Some of the most burning questions in biology in recent years concern differential diversification along the tree of life and its causes. Among others, it could be triggered by the evolution of novel phenotypes accelerating diversification in lineages that bear them. In the Pleurothallidinae, the most diversified subtribe of plants on Earth with 46 genera and ~ 5,500 species, we constructed a completely new phylogeny based on NGS data and mapped on to it the type of endoreplication with the objective...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
Many quantitative traits are subject to selection, where several genomic regions undergo small, simultaneous changes in allele frequency that collectively alter a phenotype. The widespread availability of genome data, along with novel statistical techniques, has made it easier to detect these changes. We apply one such method, the 'Singleton Density Score', to the Holstein breed of Bos taurus to detect recent selection (arising up to around 740 years ago). We identify several candidate genes for...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
Reversible plasticity in phenotypic traits allows organisms to cope with environmental variation within lifetimes, but costs of plasticity may limit just how well the phenotype matches the environmental optimum. An additional adaptive advantage of plasticity might be to reduce fitness variance, or bet-hedging to maximize geometric (rather than simply arithmetic) mean fitness. Here we model the evolution of reaction norm slopes, with increasing costs as the slope or degree of plasticity increases....
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
SimBit is a general purpose and high performance forward-in-time population genetics simulator. SimBit has been designed to be able to model a wide diversity of complex scenarios from a simple set of commands that are very flexible. SimBit also comes with a R wrapper that simplifies the management of an entire research project from the creation of a grid of parameters, the creation of inputs, running the simulation and gathering that output files for analysis. Because different simulation scenarios...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
One of the key objectives in biological research is understanding how evolutionary processes have produced Earth's biodiversity. These processes have led to a vast diversity of wing shapes in insects; an unanswered question especially pronounced in moths. As one of the major predators of nocturnal moths, bats are thought to have been involved in a long evolutionary arms race with their prey. In response, moths are thought to have evolved many counter strategies, such as diverse wing shapes and large...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
Northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) are common, mid-sized passerines widely distributed in North America. As an iconic species with strong sexual dichromatism, it has been the focus of extensive ecological and evolutionary research, yet genomic studies investigating the evolution of genotype-phenotype association of plumage coloration and dichromatism are lacking. Here we present a new, highly contiguous assembly for C. cardinalis. We generated a 1.1 Gb assembly comprised of 4,762 scaffolds,...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
Ultraconserved elements (UCEs) are stretches of hundreds of nucleotides with highly conserved cores flanked by variable regions. Although the selective forces responsible for the preservation of UCEs are unknown, they are nonetheless believed to contain phylogenetically meaningful information from deep to shallow divergence events. Phylogenetic applications of UCEs assume selection as being largely invariant across the entire locus, including its variable flanking regions. We present a Wright-Fisher...
Thu May 14, 2020 03:00
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