Biology subjects

Domaratzki, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Domaratzki, M..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

Continent-wide effects of urbanization on bird and mammal genetic diversity

AbstractUrbanization and associated environmental changes are causing global declines in vertebrate populations. In general, population declines of the magnitudes now detected should lead to reduced effective population sizes for animals living in proximity to humans and disturbed lands. This is cause for concern because effective population sizes set the rate of genetic diversity loss due to genetic drift, the rate of increase in inbreeding, and the efficiency with which selection can act on beneficial alleles. We predicted that the effects of urbanization should decrease effective population size and genetic diversity, and increase population-level genetic differentiation. To test for such patterns, we repurposed and reanalyzed publicly archived genetic data sets for North American birds and mammals. After filtering, we had usable raw genotype data from 85 studies and 41,023 individuals, sampled from 1,008 locations spanning 41 mammal and 25 bird species. We used census-based urban-rural designations, human population density, and the Human Footprint Index as measures of urbanization and habitat disturbance. As predicted, mammals sampled in more disturbed environments had lower effective population sizes and genetic diversity, and were more genetically differentiated from those in more natural environments. There were no consistent relationships detectable for birds. This suggests that, in general, mammal populations living near humans may have less capacity to respond adaptively to further environmental changes, and be more likely to suffer from effects of inbreeding.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2018

Sparse Bayesian learning for predicting phenotypes and ranking influential markers in yeast

Genomic selection and genome-wide association studies are two related problems that can be applied to the plant breeding industry. Genomic selection is a method to predict phenotypes (i.e., traits) such as yield and drought resistance in crops from high-density markers positioned throughout the genome of the varieties. In this paper, we employ employ sparse Bayesian learning as a technique for genomic selection and ranking markers based on their relevance to a trait, which can aid in genome-wide association studies. We define and explore two different forms of the sparse Bayesian learning for predicting phenotypes and identifying the most influential markers of a trait, respectively. In particular, we introduce a new framework based on sparse Bayesian and ensemble learning for ranking influential markers of a trait. Then, we apply our methods on a real-world Saccharomyces cerevisiae dataset, and analyse our results with respect to existing related works, trait heritability, as well as the accuracies obtained from the use of different kernel functions including linear, Gaussian, and string kernels. We find that sparse Bayesian methods are not only as good as other machine learning methods in predicting yeast growth in different environments, but are also capable of identifying the most important markers, including both positive and negative effects on the growth, from which biologists can get insight. This attribute can make our proposed ensemble of sparse Bayesian learners favourable in ranking markers based on their relevance to a trait.

bioinformatics↗