1. High-quality genome and methylomes illustrate features underlying evolutionary success of oaks
- Author
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Sork, Victoria L, Cokus, Shawn J, Fitz-Gibbon, Sorel T, Zimin, Aleksey V, Puiu, Daniela, Garcia, Jesse A, Gugger, Paul F, Henriquez, Claudia L, Zhen, Ying, Lohmueller, Kirk E, Pellegrini, Matteo, and Salzberg, Steven L
- Subjects
Biological Sciences ,Bioinformatics and Computational Biology ,Genetics ,Biotechnology ,Human Genome ,Biological Evolution ,DNA Methylation ,Epigenome ,Evolution ,Molecular ,Humans ,Quercus - Abstract
The genus Quercus, which emerged ∼55 million years ago during globally warm temperatures, diversified into ∼450 extant species. We present a high-quality de novo genome assembly of a California endemic oak, Quercus lobata, revealing features consistent with oak evolutionary success. Effective population size remained large throughout history despite declining since early Miocene. Analysis of 39,373 mapped protein-coding genes outlined copious duplications consistent with genetic and phenotypic diversity, both by retention of genes created during the ancient γ whole genome hexaploid duplication event and by tandem duplication within families, including numerous resistance genes and a very large block of duplicated DUF247 genes, which have been found to be associated with self-incompatibility in grasses. An additional surprising finding is that subcontext-specific patterns of DNA methylation associated with transposable elements reveal broadly-distributed heterochromatin in intergenic regions, similar to grasses. Collectively, these features promote genetic and phenotypic variation that would facilitate adaptability to changing environments.
- Published
- 2022