GTDrift: A resource for exploring the interplay between genetic drift, genomic and transcriptomic characteristics in eukaryotes

Abstract

We present GTDrift, a comprehensive data resource that enables explorations of genomic and transcriptomic characteristics alongside proxies of the intensity of genetic drift in individual species. This resource encompasses data for 1,507 eukaryotic species, including 1,414 animals and 93 green plants, and is organized in three components. The first two components contain approximations of the effective population size, which serve as indicators of the extent of random genetic drift within each species. In the first component, we meticulously investigated public databases to assemble data on life history traits such as longevity, adult body length and body mass for a set of 969 species. The second component includes estimations of the ratio between the rate of non-synonymous substitutions and the rate of synonymous substitutions (dN/dS) in protein-coding sequences for 1,324 species. This ratio provides an estimate of the efficiency of natural selection in purging deleterious substitutions. The third component encompasses various genomic and transcriptomic characteristics. With this component, we aim to facilitate comparative transcriptomics analyses across species, by providing easy-to-use processed data for more than 16,000 RNA-seq samples across 491 species. These data include intron-centered alternative splicing frequencies, gene expression levels and sequencing depth statistics for each species, obtained with a homogeneous analysis protocol. To enable cross-species comparisons, we provide orthology predictions for conserved single-copy genes based on BUSCO gene sets. To illustrate the possible uses of this database, we identify the most frequently used introns for each gene and we assess how the sequencing depth available for each species affects our power to identify major and minor splice variants.