Biology subjects

Morales Suarez, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Morales Suarez, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

A phylogenomic approach reveals a low somatic mutation rate in a long-lived plant

Somatic mutations can have important effects on the life history, ecology, and evolution of plants, but the rate at which they accumulate is poorly understood, and has been very difficult to measure directly. Here, we demonstrate a novel method to measure somatic mutations in individual plants and use this approach to estimate the somatic mutation rate in a large, long-lived, phenotypically mosaic Eucalyptus melliodora tree. Despite being 100 times larger than Arabidopsis, this tree has a per-generation mutation rate only ten times greater, which suggests that this species may have evolved mechanisms to reduce the mutation rate per unit of growth. This adds to a growing body of evidence that illuminates the correlated evolutionary shifts in mutation rate and life history in plants.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2019

The draft nuclear genome assembly of Eucalyptus pauciflora: new approaches to comparing de novo assemblies

BackgroundSelecting the best genome assembly from a collection of draft assemblies for the same species remains a difficult task. Here, we combine new and existing approaches to help to address this, using the non-model plant Eucalyptus pauciflora (snow gum) as a test case. Eucalyptus pauciflora is a long-lived tree with high economic and ecological importance. Currently, little genomic information for Eucalyptus pauciflora is available.\n\nFindingsWe generated high coverage of long-(Nanopore, 174x) and short-(Illumina, 228x) read data from a single Eucalyptus pauciflora individual and compared assemblies from four assemblers with a variety of settings: Canu, Flye, Marvel, and MaSuRCA. A key component of our approach is to keep a randomly selected collection of ~10% of both long- and short-reads separate from the assemblies to use as a validation set with which to assess the assemblies. Using this validation set along with a range of existing tools, we compared the assemblies in eight ways: contig N50, BUSCO scores, LAI scores, assembly ploidy, base-level error rate, computing genome assembly likelihoods, structural variation and genome sequence similarity. Our result showed that MaSuRCA generated the best assembly, which is 594.87 Mb in size, with a contig N50 of 3.23 Mb, and an estimated error rate of ~0.006 errors per base.\n\nConclusionsWe report a draft genome of Eucalyptus pauciflora, which will be a valuable resource for further genomic studies of eucalypts. These approaches for assessing and comparing genomes should help in assessing and choosing among many potential genome assemblies for a single species.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2018

Assembly of chloroplast genomes with long- and short-read data: a comparison of approaches using Eucalyptus pauciflora as a test case

BackgroundChloroplasts are organelles that conduct photosynthesis in plant and algal cells. Chloroplast genomes code for around 130 genes, and the information they contain is widely used in agriculture and studies of evolution and ecology. Correctly assembling complete chloroplast genomes can be challenging because the chloroplast genome contains a pair of long inverted repeats (10-30 kb). The advent of long-read sequencing technologies should alleviate this problem by providing sufficient information to completely span the inverted repeat regions. Yet, long-reads tend to have higher error rates than short-reads, and relatively little is known about the best way to combine long- and short-reads to obtain the most accurate chloroplast genome assemblies. Using Eucalyptus pauciflora, the snow gum, as a test case, we evaluated the effect of multiple parameters, such as different coverage of long (Oxford nanopore) and short (Illumina) reads, different long-read lengths, different assembly pipelines, and different genome polishing steps, with a view to determining the most accurate and efficient approach to chloroplast genome assembly.\n\nResultsHybrid assemblies combining at least 20x coverage of both long-reads and short-reads generated a single contig spanning the entire chloroplast genome with few or no detectable errors. Short-read-only assemblies generated three contigs representing the long single copy, short single copy and inverted repeat regions of the chloroplast genome. These contigs contained few single-base errors but tended to exclude several bases at the beginning or end of each contig. Long-read-only assemblies tended to create multiple contigs with a much higher single-base error rate, even after polishing. The chloroplast genome of Eucalyptus pauciflora is 159,942 bp, contains 131 genes of known function, and confirms the phylogenetic position of Eucalyptus pauciflora as a close relative of Eucalyptus regnans.\n\nConclusionsOur results suggest that very accurate assemblies of chloroplast genomes can be achieved using a combination of at least 20x coverage of long- and short-reads respectively, provided that the long-reads contain at least ~5x coverage of reads longer than the inverted repeat region. We show that further increases in coverage give little or no improvement in accuracy, and that hybrid assemblies are more accurate than long-read-only or short-read-only assemblies.

genomics↗