Registering the evolutionary history in individual-based models of speciation

Understanding the emergence of biodiversity patterns in nature is a central problem in biology. Theoretical models of speciation have addressed this question in the macroecological scale, but little has been done to connect microevolutionary processes with macroevolutionary patterns. Knowledge of the evolutionary history allows the study of patterns underlying the processes being modeled, revealing their signatures and the role of speciation and extinction in shaping macroevolutionary patterns. In this paper we introduce two algorithms to record the evolutionary history of populations and species in individual-based models of speciation, from which genealogies and phylogenies can be constructed. The first algorithm relies on saving ancestor–descendant relationships, generating a matrix that contains the times to the most recent common ancestor between all pairs of individuals at every generation (the Most Recent Common Ancestor Time matrix, MRCAT). The second algorithm directly records all speciation and extinction events throughout the evolutionary process, generating a matrix with the true phylogeny of species (the Sequential Speciation and Extinction Events, SSEE). We illustrate the use of these algorithms in a spatially explicit individual-based model of speciation. We compare the trees generated via MRCAT and SSEE algorithms with trees inferred by methods that use only genetic distance between individuals of extant species, commonly used in empirical studies and applied here to simulated genetic data. Comparisons between trees are performed with metrics describing the overall topology, branch length distribution and imbalance degree. We observe that both MRCAT and distance-based trees differ from the true phylogeny, with the first being closer to the true tree than the second.Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Muse

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead