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High-quality genome and methylomes illustrate features underlying evolutionary success of oaks.

Victoria L SorkShawn J CokusSorel T Fitz-GibbonAleksey V ZiminDaniela PuiuJesse A GarciaPaul F GuggerClaudia L HenriquezYing ZhenKirk E LohmuellerMatteo PellegriniSteven L Salzberg
Published in: Nature communications (2022)
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.
Keyphrases
  • genome wide
  • dna methylation
  • copy number
  • gene expression
  • amino acid
  • protein protein
  • small molecule
  • binding protein
  • genome wide analysis
  • neural network