scholarly journals Optimizing Phylogenomics with Rapidly Evolving Long Exons: Comparison with Anchored Hybrid Enrichment and Ultraconserved Elements

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 904-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R Karin ◽  
Tony Gamble ◽  
Todd R Jackman

Abstract Marker selection has emerged as an important component of phylogenomic study design due to rising concerns of the effects of gene tree estimation error, model misspecification, and data-type differences. Researchers must balance various trade-offs associated with locus length and evolutionary rate among other factors. The most commonly used reduced representation data sets for phylogenomics are ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and Anchored Hybrid Enrichment (AHE). Here, we introduce Rapidly Evolving Long Exon Capture (RELEC), a new set of loci that targets single exons that are both rapidly evolving (evolutionary rate faster than RAG1) and relatively long in length (>1,500 bp), while at the same time avoiding paralogy issues across amniotes. We compare the RELEC data set to UCEs and AHE in squamate reptiles by aligning and analyzing orthologous sequences from 17 squamate genomes, composed of 10 snakes and 7 lizards. The RELEC data set (179 loci) outperforms AHE and UCEs by maximizing per-locus genetic variation while maintaining presence and orthology across a range of evolutionary scales. RELEC markers show higher phylogenetic informativeness than UCE and AHE loci, and RELEC gene trees show greater similarity to the species tree than AHE or UCE gene trees. Furthermore, with fewer loci, RELEC remains computationally tractable for full Bayesian coalescent species tree analyses. We contrast RELEC to and discuss important aspects of comparable methods, and demonstrate how RELEC may be the most effective set of loci for resolving difficult nodes and rapid radiations. We provide several resources for capturing or extracting RELEC loci from other amniote groups.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Karin ◽  
Tony Gamble ◽  
Todd R. Jackman

AbstractMarker selection has emerged as an important component of phylogenomic study design due to rising concerns of the effects of gene tree estimation error, model misspecification, and data-type differences. Researchers must balance various trade-offs associated with locus length and evolutionary rate among other factors. The most commonly used reduced representation datasets for phylogenomics are ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and Anchored Hybrid Enrichment (AHE). Here, we introduce Rapidly Evolving Long Exon Capture (RELEC), a new set of loci that targets single exons that are both rapidly evolving (evolutionary rate faster than RAG1) and relatively long in length (greater than 1,500 bp), while at the same time avoiding paralogy issues across amniotes. We compare the RELEC dataset to UCEs and AHE in squamate reptiles by aligning and analyzing orthologous sequences from 17 squamate genomes, composed of ten snakes and seven lizards. The RELEC dataset (179 loci) outperforms AHE and UCEs by maximizing per-locus genetic variation while maintaining presence and orthology across a range of evolutionary scales. RELEC markers show higher phylogenetic informativeness than UCE and AHE loci, and RELEC gene trees show greater similarity to the species tree than AHE or UCE gene trees. Furthermore, with fewer loci, RELEC remains computationally tractable for full Bayesian coalescent species tree analyses. We contrast RELEC to and discuss important aspects of comparable methods, and demonstrate how RELEC may be the most effective set of loci for resolving difficult nodes and rapid radiations. We provide several resources for capturing or extracting RELEC loci from other amniote groups.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi-Kai Tea ◽  
Xin Xu ◽  
Joseph D DiBattista ◽  
Nathan Lo ◽  
Peter F Cowman ◽  
...  

Abstract The fairy wrasses (genus Cirrhilabrus) are among the most successful of the extant wrasse lineages (Teleostei: Labridae), with their 61 species accounting for nearly 10$\%$ of the family. Although species complexes within the genus have been diagnosed on the basis of coloration patterns and synapomorphies, attempts to resolve evolutionary relationships among these groups using molecular and morphological data have largely been unsuccessful. Here, we use a phylogenomic approach with a data set comprising 991 ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and mitochondrial COI to uncover the evolutionary history and patterns of temporal and spatial diversification of the fairy wrasses. Our analyses of phylogenetic signal suggest that most gene-tree incongruence is caused by estimation error, leading to poor resolution in a summary-coalescent analysis of the data. In contrast, analyses of concatenated sequences are able to resolve the major relationships of Cirrhilabrus. We determine the placements of species that were previously regarded as incertae sedis and find evidence for the nesting of Conniella, an unusual, monotypic genus, within Cirrhilabrus. Our relaxed-clock dating analysis indicates that the major divergences within the genus occurred around the Miocene–Pliocene boundary, followed by extensive cladogenesis of species complexes in the Pliocene–Pleistocene. Biogeographic reconstruction suggests that the fairy wrasses emerged within the Coral Triangle, with episodic fluctuations of sea levels during glacial cycles coinciding with shallow divergence events but providing few opportunities for more widespread dispersal. Our study demonstrates both the resolving power and limitations of UCEs across shallow timescales where there is substantial estimation error in individual gene trees.[Biogeography; concatenation; gene genealogy interrogation; gene trees; molecular dating; summary coalescent; UCEs.]


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sanderson ◽  
Michelle M. McMahon ◽  
Mike Steel

AbstractTerraces in phylogenetic tree space are sets of trees with identical optimality scores for a given data set, arising from missing data. These were first described for multilocus phylogenetic data sets in the context of maximum parsimony inference and maximum likelihood inference under certain model assumptions. Here we show how the mathematical properties that lead to terraces extend to gene tree - species tree problems in which the gene trees are incomplete. Inference of species trees from either sets of gene family trees subject to duplication and loss, or allele trees subject to incomplete lineage sorting, can exhibit terraces in their solution space. First, we show conditions that lead to a new kind of terrace, which stems from subtree operations that appear in reconciliation problems for incomplete trees. Then we characterize when terraces of both types can occur when the optimality criterion for tree search is based on duplication, loss or deep coalescence scores. Finally, we examine the impact of assumptions about the causes of losses: whether they are due to imperfect sampling or true evolutionary deletion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 937-955 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Cloutier ◽  
Timothy B Sackton ◽  
Phil Grayson ◽  
Michele Clamp ◽  
Allan J Baker ◽  
...  

Abstract Palaeognathae represent one of the two basal lineages in modern birds, and comprise the volant (flighted) tinamous and the flightless ratites. Resolving palaeognath phylogenetic relationships has historically proved difficult, and short internal branches separating major palaeognath lineages in previous molecular phylogenies suggest that extensive incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) might have accompanied a rapid ancient divergence. Here, we investigate palaeognath relationships using genome-wide data sets of three types of noncoding nuclear markers, together totaling 20,850 loci and over 41 million base pairs of aligned sequence data. We recover a fully resolved topology placing rheas as the sister to kiwi and emu + cassowary that is congruent across marker types for two species tree methods (MP-EST and ASTRAL-II). This topology is corroborated by patterns of insertions for 4274 CR1 retroelements identified from multispecies whole-genome screening, and is robustly supported by phylogenomic subsampling analyses, with MP-EST demonstrating particularly consistent performance across subsampling replicates as compared to ASTRAL. In contrast, analyses of concatenated data supermatrices recover rheas as the sister to all other nonostrich palaeognaths, an alternative that lacks retroelement support and shows inconsistent behavior under subsampling approaches. While statistically supporting the species tree topology, conflicting patterns of retroelement insertions also occur and imply high amounts of ILS across short successive internal branches, consistent with observed patterns of gene tree heterogeneity. Coalescent simulations and topology tests indicate that the majority of observed topological incongruence among gene trees is consistent with coalescent variation rather than arising from gene tree estimation error alone, and estimated branch lengths for short successive internodes in the inferred species tree fall within the theoretical range encompassing the anomaly zone. Distributions of empirical gene trees confirm that the most common gene tree topology for each marker type differs from the species tree, signifying the existence of an empirical anomaly zone in palaeognaths.


Author(s):  
Felipe V Freitas ◽  
Michael G Branstetter ◽  
Terry Griswold ◽  
Eduardo A B Almeida

Abstract Incongruence among phylogenetic results has become a common occurrence in analyses of genome-scale data sets. Incongruence originates from uncertainty in underlying evolutionary processes (e.g., incomplete lineage sorting) and from difficulties in determining the best analytical approaches for each situation. To overcome these difficulties, more studies are needed that identify incongruences and demonstrate practical ways to confidently resolve them. Here, we present results of a phylogenomic study based on the analysis 197 taxa and 2,526 ultraconserved element (UCE) loci. We investigate evolutionary relationships of Eucerinae, a diverse subfamily of apid bees (relatives of honey bees and bumble bees) with >1,200 species. We sampled representatives of all tribes within the group and >80% of genera, including two mysterious South American genera, Chilimalopsis and Teratognatha. Initial analysis of the UCE data revealed two conflicting hypotheses for relationships among tribes. To resolve the incongruence, we tested concatenation and species tree approaches and used a variety of additional strategies including locus filtering, partitioned gene-trees searches, and gene-based topological tests. We show that within-locus partitioning improves gene tree and subsequent species-tree estimation, and that this approach, confidently resolves the incongruence observed in our data set. After exploring our proposed analytical strategy on eucerine bees, we validated its efficacy to resolve hard phylogenetic problems by implementing it on a published UCE data set of Adephaga (Insecta: Coleoptera). Our results provide a robust phylogenetic hypothesis for Eucerinae and demonstrate a practical strategy for resolving incongruence in other phylogenomic data sets.


PLoS Genetics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (8) ◽  
pp. e1009701
Author(s):  
Yaxuan Wang ◽  
Zhen Cao ◽  
Huw A. Ogilvie ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

Trait evolution among a set of species—a central theme in evolutionary biology—has long been understood and analyzed with respect to a species tree. However, the field of phylogenomics, which has been propelled by advances in sequencing technologies, has ushered in the era of species/gene tree incongruence and, consequently, a more nuanced understanding of trait evolution. For a trait whose states are incongruent with the branching patterns in the species tree, the same state could have arisen independently in different species (homoplasy) or followed the branching patterns of gene trees, incongruent with the species tree (hemiplasy). Another evolutionary process whose extent and significance are better revealed by phylogenomic studies is gene flow between different species. In this work, we present a phylogenomic method for assessing the role of hybridization and introgression in the evolution of polymorphic or monomorphic binary traits. We apply the method to simulated evolutionary scenarios to demonstrate the interplay between the parameters of the evolutionary history and the role of introgression in a binary trait’s evolution (which we call xenoplasy). Very importantly, we demonstrate, including on a biological data set, that inferring a species tree and using it for trait evolution analysis in the presence of gene flow could lead to misleading hypotheses about trait evolution.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sazan Mahbub ◽  
Shashata Sawmya ◽  
Arpita Saha ◽  
Rezwana Reaz ◽  
M. Sohel Rahman ◽  
...  

Species tree estimation is frequently based on phylogenomic approaches that use multiple genes from throughout the genome. However, for a combination of reasons (ranging from sampling biases to more biological causes, as in gene birth and loss), gene trees are often incomplete, meaning that not all species of interest have a common set of genes. Incomplete gene trees can potentially impact the accuracy of phylogenomic inference. We, for the first time, introduce the problem of imputing the quartet distribution induced by a set of incomplete gene trees, which involves adding the missing quartets back to the quartet distribution. We present QT-GILD, an automated and specially tailored unsupervised deep learning technique, accompanied by cues from natural language processing (NLP), which learns the quartet distribution in a given set of incomplete gene trees and generates a complete set of quartets accordingly. QT-GILD is a general-purpose technique needing no explicit modeling of the subject system or reasons for missing data or gene tree heterogeneity. Experimental studies on a collection of simulated and empirical data sets suggest that QT-GILD can effectively impute the quartet distribution, which results in a dramatic improvement in the species tree accuracy. Remarkably, QT-GILD not only imputes the missing quartets but it can also account for gene tree estimation error. Therefore, QT-GILD advances the state-of-the-art in species tree estimation from gene trees in the face of missing data. QT-GILD is freely available in open source form at https://github.com/pythonLoader/QT-GILD .


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Christensen ◽  
Erin K. Molloy ◽  
Pranjal Vachaspati ◽  
Ananya Yammanuru ◽  
Tandy Warnow

Abstract Motivation Estimated gene trees are often inaccurate, due to insufficient phylogenetic signal in the single gene alignment, among other causes. Gene tree correction aims to improve the accuracy of an estimated gene tree by using computational techniques along with auxiliary information, such as a reference species tree or sequencing data. However, gene trees and species trees can differ as a result of gene duplication and loss (GDL), incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), and other biological processes. Thus gene tree correction methods need to take estimation error as well as gene tree heterogeneity into account. Many prior gene tree correction methods have been developed for the case where GDL is present. Results Here, we study the problem of gene tree correction where gene tree heterogeneity is instead due to ILS and/or HGT. We introduce TRACTION, a simple polynomial time method that provably finds an optimal solution to the RF-optimal tree refinement and completion (RF-OTRC) Problem, which seeks a refinement and completion of a singly-labeled gene tree with respect to a given singly-labeled species tree so as to minimize the Robinson−Foulds (RF) distance. Our extensive simulation study on 68,000 estimated gene trees shows that TRACTION matches or improves on the accuracy of well-established methods from the GDL literature when HGT and ILS are both present, and ties for best under the ILS-only conditions. Furthermore, TRACTION ties for fastest on these datasets. We also show that a naive generalization of the RF-OTRC problem to multi-labeled trees is possible, but can produce misleading results where gene tree heterogeneity is due to GDL.


Author(s):  
Yaxuan Wang ◽  
Zhen Cao ◽  
Huw A. Ogilvie ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

AbstractTrait evolution in a set of species—a central theme in evolutionary biology—has long been understood and analyzed with respect to a species tree. However, the field of phylogenomics, which has been propelled by advances in sequencing technologies, has ushered in the era of species/gene tree incongruence and, consequently, a more nuanced understanding of trait evolution. For a trait whose states are incongruent with the branching patterns in the species tree, the same state could have arisen independently in different species (homoplasy) or followed the branching patterns of gene trees, rather than the species tree (hemiplasy). Recent work by Guerrero and Hahn (PNAS 115:12787-12792, 2018) provided a significant step towards teasing apart the roles of homoplasy and hemiplasy in trait evolution by analyzing it with respect to the species tree and the gene trees within its branches.Another evolutionary process whose extent and significance are better revealed by phylogenomic studies is hybridization between different species. In this work, we present a phylogenomic method for assessing the role of hybridization and introgression in the evolution of bi-allelic traits, including polymorphic ones. We apply the method to simulated evolutionary scenarios to demonstrate the interplay between the parameters of the evolutionary history and the role of introgression in a trait’s evolution (which we call xenoplasy). Very importantly, we demonstrate, including on a biological data set, that inferring a species tree and using it for trait evolution analysis when hybridization had occurred could provide misleading hypotheses about trait evolution.


2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A Smith ◽  
Nathanael Walker-Hale ◽  
Joseph F Walker ◽  
Joseph W Brown

Abstract Studies have demonstrated that pervasive gene tree conflict underlies several important phylogenetic relationships where different species tree methods produce conflicting results. Here, we present a means of dissecting the phylogenetic signal for alternative resolutions within a data set in order to resolve recalcitrant relationships and, importantly, identify what the data set is unable to resolve. These procedures extend upon methods for isolating conflict and concordance involving specific candidate relationships and can be used to identify systematic error and disambiguate sources of conflict among species tree inference methods. We demonstrate these on a large phylogenomic plant data set. Our results support the placement of Amborella as sister to the remaining extant angiosperms, Gnetales as sister to pines, and the monophyly of extant gymnosperms. Several other contentious relationships, including the resolution of relationships within the bryophytes and the eudicots, remain uncertain given the low number of supporting gene trees. To address whether concatenation of filtered genes amplified phylogenetic signal for relationships, we implemented a combinatorial heuristic to test combinability of genes. We found that nested conflicts limited the ability of data filtering methods to fully ameliorate conflicting signal amongst gene trees. These analyses confirmed that the underlying conflicting signal does not support broad concatenation of genes. Our approach provides a means of dissecting a specific data set to address deep phylogenetic relationships while also identifying the inferential boundaries of the data set. [Angiosperms; coalescent; gene-tree conflict; genomics; phylogenetics; phylogenomics.]


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