The colouration of some traits in nestlings of altricial birds may influence parental food allocation as it may reflect physical condition or hunger. There is increasing evidence of the relationship between colouration of begging traits and nestling performance. However, evidence of the influence of hunger level on nestling colouration is scarce, mainly because of difficulty of distinguishing between the effects of physical condition and hunger levels. Here, we used the appetite stimulant cyproheptadine hydrochloride to...

A fundamental aim of adaptation genomics is to identify polymorphisms that underpin variation in fitness traits. In D. melanogaster latitudinal life-history clines exist on multiple continents and make an excellent system for dissecting the genetics of adaptation. We have previously identified numerous clinal SNPs in insulin/insulin-like growth factor signaling (IIS), a pathway known from mutant studies to affect life history. However, the effects of natural variants in this pathway remain poorly understood. Here we investigate...

How can we best learn the history of a protein's evolution? Ideally, a model of sequence evolution should capture both the process that generates genetic variation and the functional constraints determining which changes are fixed. However, in practical terms the most suitable approach may simply be the one that combines the convenience of easily available input data with the ability to return useful parameter estimates. For example, we might be interested in a measure of...

Transposable elements (TEs) inflict numerous negative effects on health and fitness as they replicate by integrating into new regions of the host genome. Even though organisms employ powerful mechanisms to demobilize TEs, transposons gradually lose repression during aging. The rising TE activity causes genomic instability and was implicated in age-dependent neurodegenerative diseases, inflammation and the determination of lifespan. It is therefore conceivable that long-lived individuals have improved TE silencing mechanisms resulting in reduced TE expression...

Basidiomycete yeasts have recently been reported as stably associated secondary fungal symbionts (SFSs) of many lichens, but their role in the symbiosis remains unknown. Attempts to sequence their genomes have been hampered both by the inability to culture them and their low abundance in the lichen thallus alongside two dominant eukaryotes (an ascomycete fungus and chlorophyte alga). Using the lichen Alectoria sarmentosa, we selectively dissolved the cortex layer in which SFSs are embedded to enrich...

The statistical basis of maximum likelihood (ML), its robustness and the fact that it appears to suffer less from biases lead to it being one of the most popular methods for tree reconstruction. Despite its popularity, very few analytical solutions for ML exist, so biases suffered by ML are not well understood. One possible bias is long branch attraction (LBA), a regularly-cited term generally used to describe a propensity for long branches to be joined...

Hybridization between wild species and their domestic congeners is considered a major concern for species conservation. Genetic integrity of the European wildcat, for instance, is of interest as the species is outnumbered by domestic cats by several orders of magnitude throughout its range. We genotyped 1071 individual wildcat samples obtained from hair traps and roadkills collected across the highly fragmented forests of western central Europe, in Germany and Luxembourg, to assess domestic cat introgression in...

Sequence alignment is essential for phylogenetic and molecular evolution inference, as well as in many other areas of bioinformatics and evolutionary biology. Inaccurate alignments can lead to severe biases in most downstream statistical analyses. Statistical alignment based on probabilistic models of sequence evolution addresses these issues by replacing heuristic score functions with evolutionary model-based probabilities. However, score-based aligners and fixed-alignment phylogenetic approaches are still more prevalent than methods based on evolutionary indel models, mostly due...

Background: Understanding the processes that lead to hybridization of wolves and dogs is of scientific and management importance, particularly over large geographical scales, as wolves can disperse great distances. However, a method to efficiently detect hybrids in routine wolf monitoring is lacking. Microsatellites offer only limited resolution due to the low number of markers showing distinctive allele frequencies between wolves and dogs. Moreover, calibration across laboratories is time-consuming and costly. In this study, we selected...

Additional file 2. List of human histone proteins from the Histone Sequence Database for every histone gene, the available set of transcript and coding sequence GENCODE annotations were obtained from the Ensembl 105 database. Next, only protein-coding transcripts identical between Ensembl automated annotation and HAVANA manual curation were retained. In those cases where several transcripts of one gene correspond to the same amino acid protein sequence, only one record was retained with preference given to...

Multiple sequence aligners typically work by progressively aligning the most closely related sequences or group of sequences according to guide trees. In PNAS, Boyce et al. report that alignments reconstructed using simple chained trees (i.e., comb-like topologies) with random leaf assignment performed better in protein structure-based benchmarks than those reconstructed using phylogenies estimated from the data as guide trees. The authors state that this result could turn decades of research in the field on its...

Phylogenetic inference is generally performed on the basis of multiple sequence alignments (MSA). Because errors in an alignment can lead to errors in tree estimation, there is a strong interest in identifying and removing unreliable parts of the alignment. In recent years several automated filtering approaches have been proposed, but despite their popularity, a systematic and comprehensive comparison of different alignment filtering methods on real data has been lacking. Here, we extend and apply recently...

Additional file 2. List of human histone proteins from the Histone Sequence Database for every histone gene, the available set of transcript and coding sequence GENCODE annotations were obtained from the Ensembl 105 database. Next, only protein-coding transcripts identical between Ensembl automated annotation and HAVANA manual curation were retained. In those cases where several transcripts of one gene correspond to the same amino acid protein sequence, only one record was retained with preference given to...

Dissemination of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes by horizontal gene transfer (HGT) mediated through plasmids is a major global concern. Genomic epidemiology studies have shown varying success of different AMR plasmids during outbreaks, but the underlying reasons for these differences are unclear. Here, we investigated two Shigella plasmids (pKSR100 and pAPR100) that circulated in the same transmission network but had starkly contrasting epidemiological outcomes to identify plasmid features that may have contributed to the differences. We...

Taxon and character sampling is central to phylogenetic experimental design yet we lack general rules. Goldman introduced a method to construct efficient sampling designs in phylogenetics, based on the calculation of expected Fisher information given a probabilistic model of sequence evolution. The considerable potential of this approach remains largely unexplored. In an earlier study, we applied Goldman’s method to a problem in the phylogenetics of caecilian amphibians and made an a priori evaluation and testable...

As a follow up to the antimycobacterial screening exercise and the release of GSK´s first Tres Cantos Antimycobacterial Set (TCAMS-TB), this paper presents the results of a second antitubercular screening effort of two hundred and fifty thousand compounds recently added to the GSK collection. The compounds were further prioritized based on not only antitubercular potency but also on physicochemical characteristics. The 50 most attractive compounds were then progressed for evaluation in three different predictive computational...

One of the best known outcomes of coevolution between species is the rejection of mimetic parasite eggs by avian hosts, which has evolved to reduce costly cuckoo parasitism. How this behavioral adaptation varies along the life of individual hosts remains poorly understood. Here we identify for the first time, lifetime patterns of egg rejection in a parasitized long-lived bird, the magpie Pica pica and show that, during the years they were studied, some females accept,...

Numerous novel adaptations characterise the radiation of notothenioids, the dominant fish group in the freezing seas of the Southern Ocean. To improve understanding of the evolution of this iconic fish group, we generated and analysed new genome assemblies for 24 species covering all major subgroups of the radiation, including five long-read assemblies. We present a new estimate for the onset of the radiation at 10.7 million years ago, based on a time-calibrated phylogeny derived from...

Additional file 1. Gene nomenclature for chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, dog, cat, pig, horse and cattle histone genes. For each gene, the VGNC ID, gene symbol and gene name are provided. Where applicable, the HGNC ID for each orthologous human gene is listed. Full Symbol Reports for each gene can be accessed using these IDs at https://vertebrate.genenames.org/ .

Additional file 1. Gene nomenclature for chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, dog, cat, pig, horse and cattle histone genes. For each gene, the VGNC ID, gene symbol and gene name are provided. Where applicable, the HGNC ID for each orthologous human gene is listed. Full Symbol Reports for each gene can be accessed using these IDs at https://vertebrate.genenames.org/ .

Phylogenetics has been foundational to SARS-CoV-2 research and public health policy, assisting in genomic surveillance, contact tracing, and assessing emergence and spread of new variants. However, phylogenetic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 have often relied on tools designed for de novo phylogenetic inference, in which all data are collected before any analysis is performed and the phylogeny is inferred once from scratch. SARS-CoV-2 datasets do not fit this mould. There are currently over 14 million sequenced SARS-CoV-2...