Great War Dundee:featuring Ragtime soldier

This comic is part of the Great War Dundee (GWD) Hidden Histories project, which was made possible thanks to the generous support of The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It was developed by Professor Christopher Murray and Phillip Vaughan and tells the story of the effect of the Great War on Dundee, and its aftermath, and draws on many of the resources and knowledge that the GWD Partnership has introduced into the public domain over the last few years. The comic contains a story written by legendary comics creator Pat Mills, who worked at DC Thomson before creating the hugely successful British science fiction comic 2000AD (1977-present)

Genome streamlining via complete loss of introns has occurred multiple times in lichenized fungal mitochondria.

Reductions in genome size and complexity are a hallmark of obligate symbioses. The mitochondrial genome displays clear examples of these reductions, with the ancestral alpha-proteobacterial genome size and gene number having been reduced by orders of magnitude in most descendent modern mitochondrial genomes. Here, we examine patterns of mitochondrial evolution specifically looking at intron size, number, and position across 58 species from 21 genera of lichenized Ascomycete fungi, representing a broad range of fungal diversity and niches. Our results show that th

Whole Genome Shotgun Sequencing Detects Greater Lichen Fungal Diversity Than Amplicon-Based Methods in Environmental Samples

In this study we demonstrate the utility of whole genome shotgun (WGS) metagenomics in study organisms with small genomes to improve upon amplicon-based estimates of biodiversity and microbial diversity in environmental samples for the purpose of understanding ecological and evolutionary processes. We generated a database of full-length and near-full-length ribosomal DNA sequence complexes from 273 lichenized fungal species and used this database to facilitate fungal species identification in the southern Appalachian Mountains using low coverage WGS at higher resolution and without the biases of amplicon-based approaches. Using this new database and methods herein developed, we detected between 2.8 and 11 times as many species from lichen fungal propagules by aligning reads from WGS-sequenced environmental samples compared to a traditional amplicon-based approach. We then conducted complete taxonomic diversity inventories of the lichens in each one-hectare plot to assess overlap between standing taxonomic diversity and diversity detected based on propagules present in environmental samples (i.e., the &ldquo;potential&rdquo; of diversity). From the environmental samples, we detected 94 species not observed in organism-level sampling in these ecosystems with high confidence using both WGS and amplicon-based methods. This study highlights the utility of WGS sequence-based approaches in detecting hidden species diversity and demonstrates that amplicon-based methods likely miss important components of fungal diversity. We suggest that the adoption of this method will not only improve understanding of biotic constraints on the distributions of biodiversity but will also help to inform important environmental policy.</p