Search

Gene phylogenies provide a rich source of information about the way evolution shapes genomes, populations, and phenotypes. In addition to substitutions, evolutionary events such as gene duplication and loss (as well as horizontal transfer) play a major role in gene evolution, and many phylogenetic models have been developed in order to reconstruct and study these events. However, these models typically make the simplifying assumption that population-related effects such as incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) are negligible. While this assumption may have been reasonable in some settings, it has become increasingly problematic as increased genome sequencing has led to denser phylogenies, where effects such as ILS are more prominent. To address this challenge, we present a new probabilistic model, DLCoal, that defines gene duplication and loss in a population setting, such that coalescence and ILS can be directly addressed. Interestingly, this model implies that in addition to the usual gene tree and species tree, there exists a third tree, the locus tree, which will likely have many applications. Using this model, we develop the first general reconciliation method that accurately infers gene duplications and losses in the presence of ILS, and we show its improved inference of orthologs, paralogs, duplications, and losses for a variety of clades, including flies, fungi, and primates. Also, our simulations show that gene duplications increase the frequency of ILS, further illustrating the importance of a joint model. Going forward, we believe that this unified model can offer insights to questions in both phylogenetics and population genetics., National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Career award NSF 0644282)

Comparative genomics provides a general methodology for discovering functional DNA elements and understanding their evolution. The availability of many related genomes enables more powerful analyses, but requires rigorous phylogenetic methods to resolve orthologous genes and regions. Here, we use 12 recently sequenced Drosophila genomes and nine fungal genomes to address the problem of accurate gene-tree reconstruction across many complete genomes. We show that existing phylogenetic methods that treat each gene tree in isolation show large-scale inaccuracies, largely due to insufficient phylogenetic information in individual genes. However, we find that gene trees exhibit common properties that can be exploited for evolutionary studies and accurate phylogenetic reconstruction. Evolutionary rates can be decoupled into gene-specific and species-specific components, which can be learned across complete genomes. We develop a phylogenetic reconstruction methodology that exploits these properties and achieves significantly higher accuracy, addressing the species-level heterotachy and enabling studies of gene evolution in the context of species evolution.