Back

Novel phylogeny of angiosperms inferred from whole-genome microsynteny analysis

Zhao, T.; Xue, J.; Kao, S.-m.; Li, Z.; Zwaenepoel, A.; Schranz, E.; Van de Peer, Y.

2020-01-16 genomics
10.1101/2020.01.15.908376 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Despite the wealth of genomic and transcriptomic data of pivotal angiosperm species, the phylogenetic relationships of flowering plants are still not fully resolved. Microsynteny, or the conservation of relative gene order, has been recognized as a valuable and alternative phylogenetic character to sequence-based characters (nucleotides or amino acids). Here, we present a novel approach for phylogenetic tree reconstruction based on genome-wide synteny network data. We generated and analyzed synteny networks from 123 species from 52 families across 31 orders of flowering plants, including several lineages for which phylogenetic relationships are ambiguous. We obtained a stable and highly resolved phylogeny that is largely congruent with sequence-based phylogenies. However, our results unveiled several novel relationships for some key clades, such as magnoliids sister to monocots, Vitales as sister to core-eudicots, and Saxifragales sister to Santalales, in turn both sister to Caryophyllales. Our results highlight that phylogenies based on genome structure and organization are complementary to sequence-based phylogenies and provide alternative hypotheses of angiosperm relationships to be further tested.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.