Chan Cheong Xin, Bhattacharya Debashish
Institute for Molecular Bioscience, and ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics; The University of Queensland; Brisbane, QLD Australia.
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, and Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences; Rutgers University; New Brunswick, NJ USA.
Mob Genet Elements. 2013 Nov 1;3(6):e27669. doi: 10.4161/mge.27669. Epub 2014 Jan 2.
The recently published genome of the unicellular red alga revealed a gene-rich, intron-poor species, which is surprising for a free-living mesophile. Of the 8,355 predicted protein-coding regions, up to 773 (9.3%) were implicated in horizontal genetic transfer (HGT) events involving other prokaryote and eukaryote lineages. A much smaller number, up to 174 (2.1%) showed unambiguous evidence of vertical inheritance. Together with other red algal genomes, nearly all published in 2013, these data provide an excellent platform for studying diverse aspects of algal biology and evolution. This novel information will help investigators test existing hypotheses about the impact of endosymbiosis and HGT on algal evolution and enable comparative analysis within a more-refined, hypothesis-driven framework that extends beyond HGT. Here we explore the impacts of this infusion of red algal genome data on addressing questions regarding the complex nature of algal evolution and highlight the need for scalable phylogenomic approaches to handle the forthcoming deluge of sequence information.
最近公布的单细胞红藻基因组显示，这是一个基因丰富、内含子较少的物种，这对于一种自由生活的嗜温生物来说是令人惊讶的。在8355个预测的蛋白质编码区域中，多达773个（9.3%）与涉及其他原核生物和真核生物谱系的水平基因转移（HGT）事件有关。数量少得多的区域，多达174个（2.1%）显示出明确的垂直遗传证据。与其他红藻基因组（几乎所有都是在2013年公布的）一起，这些数据为研究藻类生物学和进化的各个方面提供了一个极好的平台。这些新信息将有助于研究人员检验关于内共生和水平基因转移对藻类进化影响的现有假设，并能够在一个超越水平基因转移的更精细、由假设驱动的框架内进行比较分析。在这里，我们探讨了红藻基因组数据的注入对解决有关藻类进化复杂性问题的影响，并强调了需要可扩展的系统发育基因组学方法来处理即将到来的大量序列信息。
