Laboratorio de Sistemática, Genética y Evolución

Computational tools fuel reconstruction of new and improved bird family tree An international team of scientists has built the largest and most detailed bird family tree to date—an intricate chart delineating 93 million years of evolutionary relationships between 363 bird species, representing 92% of all bird families.

Laser mapping spots ant colonies in dense forest Approach could help scientists spot invasive species cheaply and quickly

Phylogenomics of Tetraopes longhorn beetles unravels their evolutionary history and biogeographic origins Tetraopes longhorn beetles are known for their resistance to milkweed plant toxins and their coevolutionary dynamics with milkweed plants (Asclepias). This association is considered a textbook example of coevolution, in which each species of Tetraopes i...

🚨NEW PAPER📖
Lars Dietz and co-authors demonstrate with empirical genomic data (universal single-copy orthologs; USCOs) the viability of a concept for a unified and thus more sustainable framework for species inference suitable for all Metazoa, as a standardized extension of classical single-marker DNA Barcoding.

Simulating data helps a researcher gain a deeper understanding of the models and their assumptions and establish the reliability of their estimation approaches. Wider adoption of data simulations by biologists can improve statistical inference, reliability and open science practices.

👉 https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14041

MitoGeneExtractor: Efficient extraction of mitochondrial genes from next‐generation sequencing libraries Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences are often found as byproducts in next-generation sequencing (NGS) datasets that were originally created to capture genomic or transcriptomic information of an o...

Climate drives global functional trait variation in lizards - Nature Ecology & Evolution The authors incorporate mechanistic information about lizard physiological responses to heat into predictions of trait variation across time and space, finding that the range of functional traits is more constrained in locations where the local climate strongly selects for thermal performance.

A Nature Communications paper suggests that mammals that live in groups may generally live longer than members of solitary species. Read the paper: https://go.nature.com/3WWHdGi

Dietary strategies of Pleistocene Pongo sp. and Homo erectus on Java (Indonesia) - Nature Ecology & Evolution Trace element ratios (strontium/calcium) in teeth of Pleistocene Homo erectus and fossil orangutans (Pongo sp.) reveal different dietary strategies and contrasting adaptations to seasonal food resources. H. erectus but not Pongo sp. was able to buffer against seasonal food oscillations by exploiting...

Genetic assimilation of ancestral plasticity during parallel adaptation to zinc contamination in Silene uniflora - Nature Ecology & Evolution Adaptation to new environments often involves changes in gene expression. This study shows a role of ancestral gene expression plasticity in heavy metal adaptation of two independent lineages of Silene uniflora.

🍂In our October issue: Rolfe et al. present SlicerMorph, an open and extensible platform for retrieving, visualising and analysing 3D morphology from a series of images such as microCT scans

Read it open access here: https://bit.ly/3jDuXdd

Como parte de las actividades anuales del Laboratorio de Genética, Sistemática y Evolución (LabSGE) se estará brindando un taller gratuito sobre Morfometría y Evolución, presencial, los días 28-30 de Noviembre. Inscripciones https://sites.google.com/site/labgeweb/