Y chromosomes are widely believed to evolve from a normal autosome through a process of massive gene loss (with preservation of some male genes), shaped by sex-antagonistic selection and complemented by occasional gains of male-related genes. The net result of these processes is a male-specialized chromosome. This might be expected to be an irreversible process, but it was found in 2005 that the Drosophila pseudoobscura Y chromosome was incorporated into an autosome. Y chromosome incorporations have important consequences: a formerly male-restricted chromosome reverts to autosomal inheritance, and the species may shift from an XY/XX to X0/XX sex-chromosome system. In order to assess the frequency and causes of this phenomenon we searched for Y chromosome incorporations in 400 species from Drosophila and related genera. We found one additional large scale event of Y chromosome incorporation, affecting the whole montium subgroup (40 species in our sample); overall 13% of the sampled species (52/400) have Y incorporations. While previous data indicated that after the Y incorporation the ancestral Y disappeared as a free chromosome, the much larger data set analyzed here indicates that a copy of the Y survived as a free chromosome both in montium and pseudoobscura species, and that the current Y of the pseudoobscura lineage results from a fusion between this free Y and the neoY. The 400 species sample also showed that the previously suggested causal connection between X-autosome fusions and Y incorporations is, at best, weak: the new case of Y incorporation (montium) does not have X-autosome fusion, whereas nine independent cases of X-autosome fusions were not followed by Y incorporations. Y incorporation is an underappreciated mechanism affecting Y chromosome evolution; our results show that at least in Drosophila it plays a relevant role and highlight the need of similar studies in other groups.

BackgroundAnopheles (Kerteszia) cruzii is the primary vector of human and simian malarias in Brazilian regions covered by the Atlantic Rainforest. Previous studies found that An. cruzii presents high levels of behavioural, chromosomal and molecular polymorphisms, which led to the hypothesis that it may be a complex of cryptic species. Here, An. cruzii specimens were collected in five sites in South-East Brazil located at different altitudes on the inner and coastal slopes of two mountain ranges covered by Atlantic Rainforest, known as Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueria. Partial sequences for two genes (Clock and cpr) were generated and compared with previously published sequences from Florianópolis (southern Brazil). Genetic diversity was analysed with estimates of population structure (FST) and haplotype phylogenetic trees in order to understand how many species of the complex may occur in this biome and how populations across the species distribution are related.ResultsThe sequences from specimens collected at sites located on the lower coastal slopes of Serra do Mar (Guapimirim, Tinguá and Sana) clustered together in the phylogenetic analysis, while the major haplotypes from sites located on higher altitude and at the continental side of the same mountains (Bocaina) clustered with those from Serra da Mantiqueira (Itatiaia), an inner mountain range. These two An. cruzii lineages showed statistically significant genetic differentiation and fixed characters, and have high FST values typical of between species comparisons. Finally, in Bocaina, where the two lineages occur in sympatry, we found deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium due to a deficit of heterozygotes, indicating partial reproductive isolation. These results strongly suggest that at least two distinct lineages of An. cruzii (provisorily named “Group 1” and “Group 2”) occur in the mountains of South-East Brazil.ConclusionsAt least two genetically distinct An. cruzii lineages occur in the Atlantic Forest covered mountains of South-East Brazil. The co-occurrence of distinct lineages of An. cruzii (possibly incipient species) in those mountains is an interesting biological phenomenon and may have important implications for malaria prevalence, Plasmodium transmission dynamics and control.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13071-018-2615-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In several Drosophila species there is a trait known as “sex-ratio”: males carrying certain X chromosomes (called “SR”) produce female biased progenies due to X-Y meiotic drive. In Drosophila mediopunctata this trait has a variable expression due to Y-linked suppressors of sex-ratio expression, among other factors. There are two types of Y chromosomes (suppressor and nonsuppressor) and two types of SR chromosomes (suppressible and unsuppressible). Sex-ratio expression is suppressed in males with the SRsuppressible/Ysuppressor genotype, whereas the remaining three genotypes produce female biased progenies. Now we have found that ∼10–20% of the Y chromosomes from two natural populations 1500 km apart are suppressors of sex-ratio expression. Preliminary estimates indicate that Ysuppressor has a meiotic drive advantage of 6% over Ynonsuppressor. This Y polymorphism for a nonneutral trait is unexpected under current population genetics theoly. We propose that this polymorphism is stabilized by an equilibrium between meiotic drive and natural selection, resulting from interactions in the population dynamics of X and Y alleles. Numerical simulations showed that this mechanism may stabilize nonneutral Y polymorphisms such as we have found in D. mediopunctata.

Sex-linked meiotic drive genes are expected to spread quickly in populations and may cause their extinction because of the lack of one sex. Theoretically, the most general evolutionary response to these genes is the spread of autosomal suppressors of meiotic drive because of Fisher's Principle, a mechanism of natural selection that would correct uneven sexual proportions. Such adaptive response depends on heritable autosomal variation for sexual proportion, which seems to be lacking in most species with chromosomal sex-determination. Natural populations of Drosophila mediopunctata bear sex-ratio X chromosomes ('SR'), an X-Y meiotic drive system that leads to female bias. In this paper we show that sexual proportion is highly heritable (h2 = 41 per cent) in experimental populations of this species because of autosomal genes, thus fulfilling the conditions for adaptive evolution of sexual proportion. The spread of autosomal suppressors is expected to have a dual effect on sexual proportion, reducing both the female excess in the progenies of SR/Y males and the frequency of SR chromosomes. Hence, prior to the spread of their suppressors, SR chromosomes presumably attained a high frequency in natural populations of D. mediopunctata, causing a strong female bias.

Genome assembly depends critically on read length. Two recent technologies, PacBio and Oxford Nanopore, produce read lengths above 20 kb, which yield genome assemblies that are vastly superior to those based on Sanger or short-reads. However, the very high error rates of both technologies (around 15%-20%) makes assembly computationally expensive and imprecise at repeats longer than the read length. Here we show that the efficiency and quality of the assembly of these noisy reads can be significantly improved at a minimal cost, by leveraging on the low error rate and low cost of Illumina short reads. Namely, k-mers from the PacBio raw reads that are not present in the Illumina reads (which account for ~95% of the distinct k-mers) are deemed as sequencing errors and ignored at the seed alignment step. By focusing on ~5% of the k-mers which are error-free, read overlap sensitivity is dramatically increased. Equally important, the validation procedure can be extended to exclude repetitive k-mers, which avoids read miscorrection at repeats and further improve the resulting assemblies. We tested the k-mer validation procedure in one long-read technology (PacBio) and one assembler (MHAP/ Celera Assembler), but is likely to yield analogous improvements with alternative long-read technologies and overlappers, such as Oxford Nanopore and BLASR/DAligner. "Thm: Perfect assembly possible iff a) errors random b) sampling is Poisson c) reads long enough 2 solve repeats." Myers, 2014 "One chromosome, one contig." Koren et al., 2012 the following real example (throughout this manuscript we set k=16, which is a typical value). The genome of the bacterium E. coli strain K-12 MG1655 has been fully sequenced and finished to high quality years ago, using Sanger reads (Blattner et al. 1997). More recently, it has been sequenced using Illumina and PacBio technologies at high coverage (77x and 94x respectively; (Kim et al. 2014); https://basespace.illumina.com). The genome itself has 4.64 Mbp, and hence contains approximately 4.64million distinct k-mers, the vast majority of them occurring only once (bacterial genomes have few repetitive regions). The PacBio reads contain a total of 436 million k-mers (4.64 million k-mers times 94fold coverage); if there were no sequencing errors, these k-mers would correspond to 4.64 million distinct k-mers, each one occurring on average 94 times. However, these reads actually contain 292,687,635 distinct k-mers (~293 millions); among these, 4,513,248 (1.5%) are correct (i.e., present in the finished E. coli genome), and the remaining 288,174,387 are sequencing errors ("error k-mers"; see Methods). As expected, the correct k-mers show up repeatedly, and their proportion among the total k-mers is 16.6%.On the other hand, most error k-mers are unique, because the chance that random errors create twice the same 16-mer sequence (or a pre-existing 16-mer) is small. Fig. 1 shows a graph of the k-mer frequency spectrum of the PacBio reads and also, for comparison, of Illumina reads. It is easier to consider fi...

Three North American cactophilic Drosophila species, D. mojavensis, D. arizonae, and D. navojoa, are of considerable evolutionary interest owing to the shift from breeding in Opuntia cacti to columnar species. The 3 species form the “mojavensis cluster” of Drosophila. The genome of D. mojavensis was sequenced in 2007 and the genomes of D. navojoa and D. arizonae were sequenced together in 2016 using the same technology (Illumina) and assembly software (AllPaths-LG). Yet, unfortunately, the D. navojoa genome was considerably more fragmented and incomplete than its sister species, rendering it less useful for evolutionary genetic studies. The D. navojoa read dataset does not fully meet the strict insert size required by the assembler used (AllPaths-LG) and this incompatibility might explain its assembly problems. Accordingly, when we re-assembled the genome of D. navojoa with the SPAdes assembler, which does not have the strict AllPaths-LG requirements, we obtained a substantial improvement in all quality indicators such as N50 (from 84 kb to 389 kb) and BUSCO coverage (from 77% to 97%). Here we share a new, improved reference assembly for D. navojoa genome, along with a RNAseq transcriptome. Given the basal relationship of the Opuntia breeding D. navojoa to the columnar breeding D. arizonae and D. mojavensis, the improved assembly and annotation will allow researchers to address a range of questions associated with the genomics of host shifts, chromosomal rearrangements and speciation in this group.

Background The Drosophilidae family is traditionally divided into two subfamilies: Drosophilinae and Steganinae. This division is based on morphological characters, and the two subfamilies have been treated as monophyletic in most of the literature, but some molecular phylogenies have suggested Steganinae to be paraphyletic. To test the paraphyletic-Steganinae hypothesis, here, we used genomic sequences of eight Drosophilidae (three Steganinae and five Drosophilinae) and two Ephydridae (outgroup) species and inferred the phylogeny for the group based on a dataset of 1,028 orthologous genes present in all species (> 1,000,000 bp). This dataset includes three genera that broke the monophyly of the subfamilies in previous works. To investigate possible biases introduced by small sample sizes and automatic gene annotation, we used the same methods to infer species trees from a set of 10 manually annotated genes that are commonly used in phylogenetics. Results Most of the 1,028 gene trees depicted Steganinae as paraphyletic with distinct topologies, but the most common topology depicted it as monophyletic (43.7% of the gene trees). Despite the high levels of gene tree heterogeneity observed, species tree inference in ASTRAL, in PhyloNet, and with the concatenation approach strongly supported the monophyly of both subfamilies for the 1,028-gene dataset. However, when using the concatenation approach to infer a species tree from the smaller set of 10 genes, we recovered Steganinae as a paraphyletic group. The pattern of gene tree heterogeneity was asymmetrical and thus could not be explained solely by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). Conclusions Steganinae was clearly a monophyletic group in the dataset that we analyzed. In addition to ILS, gene tree discordance was possibly the result of introgression, suggesting complex branching processes during the early evolution of Drosophilidae with short speciation intervals and gene flow. Our study highlights the importance of genomic data in elucidating contentious phylogenetic relationships and suggests that phylogenetic inference for drosophilids based on small molecular datasets should be performed cautiously. Finally, we suggest an approach for the correction and cleaning of BUSCO-derived genomic datasets that will be useful to other researchers planning to use this tool for phylogenomic studies.

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