The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions.
Antonis Rokas, Vanderbilt University
Two major phylogenetic studies recently reached contradictory conclusions about whether the snail’s closest relative is the bivalve (clams, oysters, mussels) or an enigmatic group of organisms called tusk shells. The work of the Vanderbilt phylogenists suggests that the conflict is due to the fact that the three groups diverged rapidly a long time ago.
“It has become common for top-notch studies to report genealogies that strongly contradict each other in where certain organisms sprang from, such as the place of sponges on the animal tree or of snails on the tree of mollusks,” said Antonis Rokas, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University.
In a study published online May 8 by the journal Nature, Rokas and graduate student Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these differences and propose a suite of novel techniques that can resolve the contradictions and provide greater accuracy in deciphering the deep branches of life’s tree.
“The study by Salichos and Rokas comes at a critical time when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data. These authors provide intriguing insights into our standard analytical toolbox, and suggest it may be time to abandon some of our most trusted tools when it comes to the analysis of big data sets. This significant work will certainly challenge the community of evolutionary biologists to rethink how best to reconstruct phylogeny,” said Michael F. Whiting, program director of systematics and biodiversity science at the National Science Foundation, which funded the study.
To gain insight into this paradox, Salichos assembled and analyzed more than 1,000 genes – approximately 20 percent of the entire yeast genome – from each of 23 yeast species. He quickly realized that the histories of the 1,000-plus genes were all slightly different from each other as well as different from the genealogy constructed from a simultaneous analysis of all the genes.
“I was quite surprised by this result,” Salichos pointed out.
By adapting an algorithm from information theory, the researchers found that they could use these distinct gene genealogies to quantify the conflict and focus on those parts of the tree that are problematic.
In broad terms, Rokas and Salichos found that genetic data is less reliable during periods of rapid radiation, when new species were formed rapidly. A case in point is the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance about 540 million years ago of a remarkable diversity of animal species, without apparent predecessors. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were very simple, consisting of single cells occasionally organized into colonies.
“A lot of the debate on the differences in the trees has been between studies concerning the ‘bushy’ branches that took place in these ‘radiations’,” Rokas said.
The researchers also found that the further back in time they went the less reliable the genetic data becomes. “Radioactive dating methods are only accurate over a certain time span,” said Rokas. “We think that the value of DNA data might have a similar limit, posing considerable challenges to existing algorithms to resolve radiations that took place in deep time.”The research was supported by National Science Foundation CAREER award DEB-0844968.
Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]
David F. Salisbury | Vanderbilt University
The world's tiniest first responders
21.06.2018 | University of Southern California
A new toxin in Cholera bacteria discovered by scientists in Umeå
21.06.2018 | Schwedischer Forschungsrat - The Swedish Research Council
In a recent publication in the renowned journal Optica, scientists of Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena showed that they can accurately control the optical properties of liquid-core fiber lasers and therefore their spectral band width by temperature and pressure tuning.
Already last year, the researchers provided experimental proof of a new dynamic of hybrid solitons– temporally and spectrally stationary light waves resulting...
Scientists from the University of Freiburg and the University of Basel identified a master regulator for bone regeneration. Prasad Shastri, Professor of...
Moving into its fourth decade, AchemAsia is setting out for new horizons: The International Expo and Innovation Forum for Sustainable Chemical Production will take place from 21-23 May 2019 in Shanghai, China. With an updated event profile, the eleventh edition focusses on topics that are especially relevant for the Chinese process industry, putting a strong emphasis on sustainability and innovation.
Founded in 1989 as a spin-off of ACHEMA to cater to the needs of China’s then developing industry, AchemAsia has since grown into a platform where the latest...
The BMBF-funded OWICELLS project was successfully completed with a final presentation at the BMW plant in Munich. The presentation demonstrated a Li-Fi communication with a mobile robot, while the robot carried out usual production processes (welding, moving and testing parts) in a 5x5m² production cell. The robust, optical wireless transmission is based on spatial diversity; in other words, data is sent and received simultaneously by several LEDs and several photodiodes. The system can transmit data at more than 100 Mbit/s and five milliseconds latency.
Modern production technologies in the automobile industry must become more flexible in order to fulfil individual customer requirements.
An international team of scientists has discovered a new way to transfer image information through multimodal fibers with almost no distortion - even if the fiber is bent. The results of the study, to which scientist from the Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology Jena (Leibniz IPHT) contributed, were published on 6thJune in the highly-cited journal Physical Review Letters.
Endoscopes allow doctors to see into a patient’s body like through a keyhole. Typically, the images are transmitted via a bundle of several hundreds of optical...
13.06.2018 | Event News
08.06.2018 | Event News
05.06.2018 | Event News
21.06.2018 | Earth Sciences
21.06.2018 | Life Sciences
21.06.2018 | Earth Sciences