Biology subjects

Conrad, R. E.

Publications and source records attributed to Conrad, R. E..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

MicrobeAnnotator: a user-friendly, comprehensive microbial genome annotation pipeline

SummaryHigh-throughput sequencing has increased the number of microbial genomes from isolates, single cells, and metagenomes available. To analyze and compare these genomes, fast and comprehensive annotation pipelines are needed. Although several approaches exist for genome annotation, these are typically not designed for easy incorporation into analysis pipelines, do not combine results from several annotation databases or offer easy-to-use summaries of metabolic reconstructions in a high-throughput mode. Here, we introduce MicrobeAnnotator, a fully automated pipeline for the comprehensive annotation of microbial genomes that combines results from several reference protein databases to reliably summarize the metabolic potential of the genomes based on KEGG modules. AvailabilityMicrobeAnnotator is implemented in Python and is freely available under an open source Artistic Licence 2.0 from https://github.com/cruizperez/MicrobeAnnotator Contactcruizperez3@gatech.edu; kostas@ce.gatech.edu

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Chromosome fusions shape an ancient UV sex chromosome system

Non-recombining sex chromosomes, like the mammalian Y, often lose genes and accumulate transposable elements, a process termed degeneration1,2. The correlation between suppressed recombination and degeneration is clear in animal XY systems1,2, but the absence of recombination is confounded with other asymmetries between the X and Y. In contrast, UV sex chromosomes, like those found in bryophytes, experience symmetrical population genetic conditions3,4. Here we test for degeneration in the bryophyte UV sex chromosome system through genomic comparisons with new female and male chromosome-scale reference genomes of the moss Ceratodon purpureus. We show that the moss sex chromosomes evolved over 300 million years ago and expanded via two chromosomal fusions. Although the sex chromosomes show signs of weaker purifying selection than autosomes, we find suppressed recombination alone is insufficient to drive gene loss on sex-specific chromosomes. Instead, the U and V sex chromosomes harbor thousands of broadly-expressed genes, including numerous key regulators of sexual development across land plants.

evolutionary biology↗