scholarly journals A genome‐wide investigation of adaptive signatures in protein‐coding genes related to tool behaviour in New Caledonian and Hawaiian crows

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Dussex ◽  
Verena E. Kutschera ◽  
R. Axel W. Wiberg ◽  
Darren J. Parker ◽  
Gavin R. Hunt ◽  
...  
Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 366 (6472) ◽  
pp. eaax9198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Uhlen ◽  
Max J. Karlsson ◽  
Wen Zhong ◽  
Abdellah Tebani ◽  
Christian Pou ◽  
...  

Blood is the predominant source for molecular analyses in humans, both in clinical and research settings. It is the target for many therapeutic strategies, emphasizing the need for comprehensive molecular maps of the cells constituting human blood. In this study, we performed a genome-wide transcriptomic analysis of protein-coding genes in sorted blood immune cell populations to characterize the expression levels of each individual gene across the blood cell types. All data are presented in an interactive, open-access Blood Atlas as part of the Human Protein Atlas and are integrated with expression profiles across all major tissues to provide spatial classification of all protein-coding genes. This allows for a genome-wide exploration of the expression profiles across human immune cell populations and all major human tissues and organs.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaobo Li ◽  
Weronika Patena ◽  
Friedrich Fauser ◽  
Robert E. Jinkerson ◽  
Shai Saroussi ◽  
...  

Photosynthetic organisms provide food and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet half of their protein-coding genes remain uncharacterized1,2. Characterization of these genes could be greatly accelerated by new genetic resources for unicellular organisms that complement the use of multicellular plants by enabling higher-throughput studies. Here, we generated a genome-wide, indexed library of mapped insertion mutants for the flagship unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Chlamydomonas hereafter). The 62,389 mutants in the library, covering 83% of nuclear, protein-coding genes, are available to the community. Each mutant contains unique DNA barcodes, allowing the collection to be screened as a pool. We leveraged this feature to perform a genome-wide survey of genes required for photosynthesis, which identified 303 candidate genes. Characterization of one of these genes, the conserved predicted phosphatase CPL3, showed it is important for accumulation of multiple photosynthetic protein complexes. Strikingly, 21 of the 43 highest-confidence genes are novel, opening new opportunities for advances in our understanding of this biogeochemically fundamental process. This library is the first genome-wide mapped mutant resource in any unicellular photosynthetic organism, and will accelerate the characterization of thousands of genes in algae, plants and animals.


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 643
Author(s):  
Thibaud Kuca ◽  
Brandy M. Marron ◽  
Joana G. P. Jacinto ◽  
Julia M. Paris ◽  
Christian Gerspach ◽  
...  

Genodermatosis such as hair disorders mostly follow a monogenic mode of inheritance. Congenital hypotrichosis (HY) belong to this group of disorders and is characterized by abnormally reduced hair since birth. The purpose of this study was to characterize the clinical phenotype of a breed-specific non-syndromic form of HY in Belted Galloway cattle and to identify the causative genetic variant for this recessive disorder. An affected calf born in Switzerland presented with multiple small to large areas of alopecia on the limbs and on the dorsal part of the head, neck, and back. A genome-wide association study using Swiss and US Belted Galloway cattle encompassing 12 cases and 61 controls revealed an association signal on chromosome 29. Homozygosity mapping in a subset of cases refined the HY locus to a 1.5 Mb critical interval and subsequent Sanger sequencing of protein-coding exons of positional candidate genes revealed a stop gain variant in the HEPHL1 gene that encodes a multi-copper ferroxidase protein so-called hephaestin like 1 (c.1684A>T; p.Lys562*). A perfect concordance between the homozygous presence of this most likely pathogenic loss-of-function variant and the HY phenotype was found. Genotyping of more than 700 purebred Swiss and US Belted Galloway cattle showed the global spread of the mutation. This study provides a molecular test that will permit the avoidance of risk matings by systematic genotyping of relevant breeding animals. This rare recessive HEPHL1-related form of hypotrichosis provides a novel large animal model for similar human conditions. The results have been incorporated in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals (OMIA) database (OMIA 002230-9913).


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 258
Author(s):  
Konrad Lohse ◽  
Alexander Mackintosh ◽  
Roger Vila ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

We present a genome assembly from an individual male Aglais io (also known as Inachis io and Nymphalis io) (the European peacock; Arthropoda; Insecta; Lepidoptera; Nymphalidae). The genome sequence is 384 megabases in span. The majority (99.91%) of the assembly is scaffolded into 31 chromosomal pseudomolecules, with the Z sex chromosome assembled. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl has identified 11,420 protein coding genes.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Cruz ◽  
Monica Della Rosa ◽  
Christel Krueger ◽  
Qian Gao ◽  
Lucy Field ◽  
...  

AbstractTranscription of protein coding genes is accompanied by recruitment of COMPASS to promoter-proximal chromatin, which deposits di- and tri-methylation on histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4) to form H3K4me2 and H3K4me3. Here we determine the importance of COMPASS in maintaining gene expression across lifespan in budding yeast. We find that COMPASS mutations dramatically reduce replicative lifespan and cause widespread gene expression defects. Known repressive functions of H3K4me2 are progressively lost with age, while hundreds of genes become dependent on H3K4me3 for full expression. Induction of these H3K4me3 dependent genes is also impacted in young cells lacking COMPASS components including the H3K4me3-specific factor Spp1. Remarkably, the genome-wide occurrence of H3K4me3 is progressively reduced with age despite widespread transcriptional induction, minimising the normal positive correlation between promoter H3K4me3 and gene expression. Our results provide clear evidence that H3K4me3 is required to attain normal expression levels of many genes across organismal lifespan.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Change Laura Tan

AbstractPublic access to thousands of completely sequenced and annotated genomes provides a great opportunity to address the relationships of different organisms, at the molecular level and on a genome-wide scale. Via comparing the phylogenetic profiles of all protein-coding genes in 317 model species described in the OrthoInspector3.0 database, we found that approximately 29.8% of the total protein-coding genes were orphan genes (genes unique to a specific species) while < 0.01% were universal genes (genes with homologs in each of the 317 species analyzed). When weighted by potential birth event, the orphan genes comprised 82% of the total, while the universal genes accounted for less than 0.00008%. Strikingly, as the analyzed genomes increased, the sum total of universal and nearly-universal genes plateaued while that of orphan and nearly-orphan genes grew continuously. When the compared species increased to the inclusion of 3863 bacteria, 711 eukaryotes, and 179 archaea, not one of the universal genes remained. The results speak to a previously unappreciated degree of genetic biodiversity, which we propose to quantify using the birth-event-weighted gene count method.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinrong Huang ◽  
Lin Lin ◽  
Zhanying Dong ◽  
Ling Yang ◽  
Tianyu Zheng ◽  
...  

Abstract Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing, catalyzed by ADAR enzymes, is an essential post-transcriptional modification. Although hundreds of thousands of RNA editing sites have been reported in mammals, brain-wide analysis of the RNA editing in the mammalian brain remains rare. Here, a genome-wide RNA editing investigation is performed in 119 samples, representing 30 anatomically defined subregions in the pig brain. We identify a total of 682,037 A-to-I RNA editing sites of which 97% are not identified before. Within the pig brain, cerebellum and olfactory bulb are regions with most edited transcripts. The editing level of sites residing in protein-coding regions are similar across brain regions, whereas region-distinct editing is observed in repetitive sequences. Highly edited conserved recoding events in pig and human brain are found in neurotransmitter receptors, demonstrating the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in neurotransmission functions. The porcine brain-wide RNA landscape provides a rich resource to better understand the evolutionally importance of post-transcriptional RNA editing.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Wilbrandt ◽  
Bernhard Misof ◽  
Kristen A. Panfilio ◽  
Oliver Niehuis

Abstract Background The location and modular structure of eukaryotic protein-coding genes in genomic sequences can be automatically predicted by gene annotation algorithms. These predictions are often used for comparative studies on gene structure, gene repertoires, and genome evolution. However, automatic annotation algorithms do not yet correctly identify all genes within a genome, and manual annotation is often necessary to obtain accurate gene models and gene sets. As manual annotation is time-consuming, only a fraction of the gene models in a genome is typically manually annotated, and this fraction often differs between species. To assess the impact of manual annotation efforts on genome-wide analyses of gene structural properties, we compared the structural properties of protein-coding genes in seven diverse insect species sequenced by the i5k initiative. Results Our results show that the subset of genes chosen for manual annotation by a research community (3.5–7% of gene models) may have structural properties (e.g., lengths and exon counts) that are not necessarily representative for a species’ gene set as a whole. Nonetheless, the structural properties of automatically generated gene models are only altered marginally (if at all) through manual annotation. Major correlative trends, for example a negative correlation between genome size and exonic proportion, can be inferred from either the automatically predicted or manually annotated gene models alike. Vice versa, some previously reported trends did not appear in either the automatic or manually annotated gene sets, pointing towards insect-specific gene structural peculiarities. Conclusions In our analysis of gene structural properties, automatically predicted gene models proved to be sufficiently reliable to recover the same gene-repertoire-wide correlative trends that we found when focusing on manually annotated gene models only. We acknowledge that analyses on the individual gene level clearly benefit from manual curation. However, as genome sequencing and annotation projects often differ in the extent of their manual annotation and curation efforts, our results indicate that comparative studies analyzing gene structural properties in these genomes can nonetheless be justifiable and informative.


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