Abstract: The present invention concerns methods and compositions for identifying genes and/or proteins involved in hibernation, activators and/or inhibitors of such genes or proteins, and methods of therapeutic use of such activators and/or inhibitors for treatment of a wide variety of diseases and/or medical conditions. In particular embodiments, such hibernation-related genes may include, but are not limited to, Adfp, Atr4, Cact, Myl6, Ca3, Ckm, Rps2, Lgmn, Fabpa, Fabph and Cyp51a1. Compounds that regulate the activities or functions of the Adfp, Atf4, Cact, Myl6, Ca3, Ckm, Rps2, Lgmn, Fabpa, Fabph and Cyp51a1 genes are known in the art and may be used for therapeutic treatment of diseases involving cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, respiratory, neurologic or immunologic function.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for comparing biological sequences from a known source of sequences, with a subject (query) sequence. The apparatus takes as input a set of target similarity levels (such as evolutionary distances in units of PAM), and finds all fragments of known sequences that are similar to the subject sequence at each target similarity level, and are long enough to be statistically significant. The invention device filters out fragments from the known sequences that are too short, or have a lower average similarity to the subject sequence than is required by each target similarity level. The subject sequence is then compared only to the remaining known sequences to find the best matches. The filtering member divides the subject sequence into overlapping blocks, each block being sufficiently large to contain a minimum-length alignment from a known sequence.