| Website | https://jcerca.github.io |
| Scholar page | https://scholar.google.pt/citations?user=ZI1vWPEAAAAJ&hl=en |
Genomics people - can you help me? 🆘
This publication writes: "Data will be made available on request."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378111923008727
ENA: "No public data is associated with this project."
What do you do when the author and the editor in chief do not answer?
We found no accumulation over time or specific groups of TEs.
So our conclusion was
📉 Rather than fueling macroevolution, TEs might just be "along for the ride", and we emphasize the distinction between TEs as drivers of specific phenotypes (e.g. melanic form of the pepper moth) and TEs are drivers of diversification (which they do not seem to do).
New publication out 🆕 📤
"No evidence of transposable element bursts in the Galápagos Scalesia adaptive radiation despite hybridization, diversification and ecological niche shifts"
https://mobilednajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13100-025-00362-z
🔍 Despite rapid speciation, niche shifts, & hybridization, we found no significant TE accumulation differences across species or hybrids.
🌵 Even in arid-adapted lineages—where genome downsizing may be expected—TEs didn’t decline.
#TransposableElements #Speciation #AdaptiveRadiation #Genomics
[Please share widely]
Come work at the U. of Oslo. We are advertising a 3-year postdoc in Evolutionary and Comparative Genomics. If working with plant evolution in the Galápagos, pangenome and structural variants sounds exciting for you - this may be your chance!
One thing I appreciate about 'modern times' is that we are emphasizing kindness more: we should be kinder reviewers, colleagues etc.
This also opens the door for 'signaling', and it makes me disappointed seeing people copy-pasting AI mumbo-jumbo under 'lab values' on websites.
... and found that for larger orders, there are very Scalesia-specific TE clusters when compared to the outgroup.
TL;DR
No evidence for TE release in hybrid pops
No evidence for TE control in different climatic niches
Why?
These are very TE-rich genomes ( 80% of the genome are TEs), perhaps they hit some cap.
Removing individual TEs from genomes may not confer a selective advantage when genomes are large.
Thank you for reading!
When clustering TEs and making an upset plot (a Venn diagram), we find that most clusters are present in every species, and a minority is species-specific (Fig 03).
We found little variation in TE counts on the genomes when considering super families (Fig 04).
When looking at transposable element accumulation through time we find that all - but a single individual - hav esimilar TE accumulation dynamics through time.
TL; DR No variation in time of accumulation
In this paper we test two hypotheses:
- Whether hybrid populations have more TEs than non-hybrid populations (genome shock hypothesis)
- Whether lineages in different climatic niches have different TE compositions (arid species may have selective pressures to reduce genome size)
We focused on Scalesia, an adaptive radiation on the Galápagos with variation in ecological niches (zones) and soils.
We observe no differences in terms of TE classes when doing comparative phylogenomics.
📰🧬🔛 New pre-print on transposable element (#TEs) evolution, #Galápagos, and #Scalesia.
"Genomic stability in the Galapagos Scalesia adaptive radiation: Consistent transposable element accumulation despite hybridization and ecological niche shifts"
