20 research outputs found
The complete mitochondrial genome of Flustra foliacea (Ectoprocta, Cheilostomata) - compositional bias affects phylogenetic analyses of lophotrochozoan relationships
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The phylogenetic relationships of the lophophorate lineages, ectoprocts, brachiopods and phoronids, within Lophotrochozoa are still controversial. We sequenced an additional mitochondrial genome of the most species-rich lophophorate lineage, the ectoprocts. Although it is known that there are large differences in the nucleotide composition of mitochondrial sequences of different lineages as well as in the amino acid composition of the encoded proteins, this bias is often not considered in phylogenetic analyses. We applied several approaches for reducing compositional bias and saturation in the phylogenetic analyses of the mitochondrial sequences.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The complete mitochondrial genome (16,089 bp) of <it>Flustra foliacea </it>(Ectoprocta, Gymnolaemata, Cheilostomata) was sequenced. All protein-encoding, rRNA and tRNA genes are transcribed from the same strand. <it>Flustra </it>shares long intergenic sequences with the cheilostomate ectoproct <it>Bugula</it>, which might be a synapomorphy of these taxa. Further synapomorphies might be the loss of the DHU arm of the tRNA L(UUR), the loss of the DHU arm of the tRNA S(UCN) and the unique anticodon sequence GAG of the tRNA L(CUN). The gene order of the mitochondrial genome of <it>Flustra </it>differs strongly from that of the other known ectoprocts. Phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial nucleotide and amino acid data sets show that the lophophorate lineages are more closely related to trochozoan phyla than to deuterostomes or ecdysozoans confirming the Lophotrochozoa hypothesis. Furthermore, they support the monophyly of Cheilostomata and Ectoprocta. However, the relationships of the lophophorate lineages within Lophotrochozoa differ strongly depending on the data set and the used method. Different approaches for reducing heterogeneity in nucleotide and amino acid data sets and saturation did not result in a more robust resolution of lophotrochozoan relationships.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The contradictory and usually weakly supported phylogenetic reconstructions of the relationships among lophotrochozoan phyla based on mitochondrial sequences indicate that these alone do not contain enough information for a robust resolution of the relations of the lophotrochozoan phyla. The mitochondrial gene order is also not useful for inferring their phylogenetic relationships, because it is highly variable in ectoprocts, brachiopods and some other lophotrochozoan phyla. However, our study revealed several rare genomic changes like the evolution of long intergenic sequences and changes in the structure of tRNAs, which may be helpful for reconstructing ectoproct phylogeny.</p
Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for cattle stature identifies common genes that regulate body size in mammals
peer-reviewedH.D.D., A.J.C., P.J.B. and B.J.H. would like to acknowledge the Dairy Futures
Cooperative Research Centre for funding. H.P. and R.F. acknowledge funding
from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the
AgroClustEr âSynbreedâSynergistic Plant and Animal Breedingâ (grant 0315527B).
H.P., R.F., R.E. and K.-U.G. acknowledge the Arbeitsgemeinschaft SĂźddeutscher
RinderzĂźchter, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ăsterreichischer FleckviehzĂźchter
and ZuchtData EDV Dienstleistungen for providing genotype data. A. Bagnato
acknowledges the European Union (EU) Collaborative Project LowInputBreeds
(grant agreement 222623) for providing Brown Swiss genotypes. Braunvieh Schweiz
is acknowledged for providing Brown Swiss phenotypes. H.P. and R.F. acknowledge
the German Holstein Association (DHV) and the ConfederaciĂłn de Asociaciones
de Frisona EspaĂąola (CONCAFE) for sharing genotype data. H.P. was financially
supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG) (grant PA 2789/1-1). D.B. and D.C.P. acknowledge funding from the
Research Stimulus Fund (11/S/112) and Science Foundation Ireland (14/IA/2576).
M.S. and F.S.S. acknowledge the Canadian Dairy Network (CDN) for providing the
Holstein genotypes. P.S. acknowledges funding from the Genome Canada project
entitled âWhole Genome Selection through Genome Wide Imputation in Beef Cattleâ and acknowledges WestGrid and Compute/Calcul Canada for providing
computing resources. J.F.T. was supported by the National Institute of Food and
Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, under awards 2013-68004-20364 and
2015-67015-23183. A. Bagnato, F.P., M.D. and J.W. acknowledge EU Collaborative
Project Quantomics (grant 516 agreement 222664) for providing Brown Swiss
and Finnish Ayrshire sequences and genotypes. A.C.B. and R.F.V. acknowledge
funding from the publicâprivate partnership âBreed4Foodâ (code BO-22.04-011-
001-ASG-LR) and EU FP7 IRSES SEQSEL (grant 317697). A.C.B. and R.F.V.
acknowledge CRV (Arnhem, the Netherlands) for providing data on Dutch and
New Zealand Holstein and Jersey bulls.Stature is affected by many polymorphisms of small effect in humans1. In contrast, variation in dogs, even within breeds, has been suggested to be largely due to variants in a small number of genes2,3. Here we use data from cattle to compare the genetic architecture of stature to those in humans and dogs. We conducted a meta-analysis for stature using 58,265 cattle from 17 populations with 25.4 million imputed whole-genome sequence variants. Results showed that the genetic architecture of stature in cattle is similar to that in humans, as the lead variants in 163 significantly associated genomic regions (P < 5 Ă 10â8) explained at most 13.8% of the phenotypic variance. Most of these variants were noncoding, including variants that were also expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) and in ChIPâseq peaks. There was significant overlap in loci for stature with humans and dogs, suggesting that a set of common genes regulates body size in mammals