Taoyang Wu

Evolutionary genomics of the cold-adapted diatom Fragilariopsis cylindrus

The Southern Ocean houses a diverse and productive community of organisms. Unicellular eukaryotic diatoms are the main primary producers in this environment, where photosynthesis is limited by low concentrations of dissolved iron and large seasonal fluctuations in light, temperature and the extent of sea ice. How diatoms have adapted to this extreme environment is largely unknown. Here we present insights into the genome evolution of a cold-adapted diatom from the Southern Ocean, Fragilariopsis cylindrus, based on a comparison with temperate diatoms. We find that approximately 24.7 per cent of the diploid F. cylindrus genome consists of genetic loci with alleles that are highly divergent (15.1 megabases of the total genome size of 61.1 megabases). These divergent alleles were differentially expressed across environmental conditions, including darkness, low iron, freezing, elevated temperature and increased CO2. Alleles with the largest ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous nucleotide substitutions also show the most pronounced condition-dependent expression, suggesting a correlation between diversifying selection and allelic differentiation. Divergent alleles may be involved in adaptation to environmental fluctuations in the Southern Ocean.

How much information is needed to infer reticulate evolutionary histories

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of evolutionary trees and are an important tool for analyzing reticulate evolutionary histories. Recently, there has been great interest in developing new methods to construct rooted phylogenetic networks, that is, networks whose internal vertices correspond to hypothetical ancestors, whose leaves correspond to sampled taxa, and in which vertices with more than one parent correspond to taxa formed by reticulate evolutionary events such as recombination or hybridization. Several methods for constructing evolutionary trees use the strategy of building up a tree from simpler building blocks (such as triplets or clusters), and so it is natural to look for ways to construct networks from smaller networks. In this article, we shall demonstrate a fundamental issue with this approach. Namely, we show that even if we are given all of the subnetworks induced on all proper subsets of the leaves of some rooted phylogenetic network, we still do not have all of the information required to completely determine that network. This implies that even if all of the building blocks for some reticulate evolutionary history were to be taken as the input for any given network building method, the method might still output an incorrect history. We also discuss some potential consequences of this result for constructing phylogenetic networks.

On the Neighborhoods of Trees

Tree rearrangement operations typically induce a metric on the space of phylogenetic trees. One important property of these metrics is the size of the neighborhood, that is, the number of trees exactly one operation from a given tree. We present an exact expression for the size of the TBR (tree bisection and reconnection) neighborhood, thus answering a question first posed by Allen and Steel . In addition, we also obtain a characterization of the extremal trees whose TBR neighborhoods are maximized and minimized.

Structural properties of the reconciliation space and their applications in enumerating nearly-optimal reconciliations between a gene tree and a species tree

IntroductionA gene tree for a gene family is often discordant with the containing species tree because of its complex evolutionary course during which gene duplication, gene loss and incomplete lineage sorting events might occur. Hence, it is of great challenge to infer the containing species tree from a set of gene trees. One common approach to this inference problem is through gene tree and species tree reconciliation.ResultsIn this paper, we generalize the traditional least common ancestor (LCA) reconciliation to define a reconciliation between a gene tree and species tree under the tree homomorphism framework. We then study the structural properties of the space of all reconciliations between a gene tree and a species tree in terms of the gene duplication, gene loss or deep coalescence costs. As application, we show that the LCA reconciliation is the unique one that has the minimum deep coalescence cost, provide a novel characterization of the reconciliations with the optimal duplication cost, and present efficient algorithms for enumerating (nearly-)optimal reconciliations with respect to each cost.ConclusionsThis work provides a new graph-theoretic framework for studying gene tree and species tree reconciliations.

On the guessing number of shift graphs

In this paper we investigate guessing number, a relatively new concept linked to network coding and certain long standing open questions in circuit complexity. Here we study the bounds and a variety of properties concerning this parameter. As an application, we obtain the lower and upper bounds for shift graphs, a subclass of directed circulant graphs.

Spaces of phylogenetic networks from generalized nearest-neighbor interchange operations

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of evolutionary or phylogenetic trees that are used to represent the evolution of species which have undergone reticulate evolution. In this paper we consider spaces of such networks defined by some novel local operations that we introduce for converting one phylogenetic network into another. These operations are modeled on the well-studied nearest-neighbor interchange operations on phylogenetic trees, and lead to natural generalizations of the tree spaces that have been previously associated to such operations. We present several results on spaces of some relatively simple networks, called level-1 networks, including the size of the neighborhood of a fixed network, and bounds on the diameter of the metric defined by taking the smallest number of operations required to convert one network into another. We expect that our results will be useful in the development of methods for systematically searching for optimal phylogenetic networks using, for example, likelihood and Bayesian approaches.

The complexity of the weight problem for permutation and matrix groups

Given a metric d on a permutation group G, the corresponding weight problem is to decide whether there exists an element @p@?G such that d(@p,e)=k, for some given value k. Here we show that this problem is NP-complete for many well-known metrics. An analogous problem in matrix groups, eigenvalue-free problem, and two related problems in permutation groups, the maximum and minimum weight problems, are also investigated in this paper.

TriLoNet: Piecing Together Small Networks to Reconstruct Reticulate Evolutionary Histories

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of evolutionary trees that can be used to represent reticulate processes such as hybridization and recombination. Here, we introduce a new approach called TriLoNet (Trinet Level- one Network algorithm) to construct such networks directly from sequence alignments which works by piecing together smaller phylogenetic networks. More specifically, using a bottom up approach similar to Neighbor-Joining, TriLoNet constructs level-1 networks (networks that are somewhat more general than trees) from smaller level-1 networks on three taxa. In simulations, we show that TriLoNet compares well with Lev1athan, a method for reconstructing level-1 networks from three-leaved trees. In particular, in simulations we find that Lev1athan tends to generate networks that overestimate the number of reticulate events as compared with those generated by TriLoNet. We also illustrate TriLoNets applicability using simulated and real sequence data involving recombination, demonstrating that it has the potential to reconstruct informative reticulate evolutionary histories. TriLoNet has been implemented in JAVA and is freely available at https://www.uea.ac.uk/computing/TriLoNet.

Transforming phylogenetic networks: Moving beyond tree space

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that are used to represent reticulate evolution. Unrooted phylogenetic networks form a special class of such networks, which naturally generalize unrooted phylogenetic trees. In this paper we define two operations on unrooted phylogenetic networks, one of which is a generalization of the well-known nearest-neighbor interchange (NNI) operation on phylogenetic trees. We show that any unrooted phylogenetic network can be transformed into any other such network using only these operations. This generalizes the well-known fact that any phylogenetic tree can be transformed into any other such tree using only NNI operations. It also allows us to define a generalization of tree space and to define some new metrics on unrooted phylogenetic networks. To prove our main results, we employ some fascinating new connections between phylogenetic networks and cubic graphs that we have recently discovered. Our results should be useful in developing new strategies to search for optimal phylogenetic networks, a topic that has recently generated some interest in the literature, as well as for providing new ways to compare networks.

Folding and unfolding phylogenetic trees and networks

Phylogenetic networks are rooted, labelled directed acyclic graphswhich are commonly used to represent reticulate evolution. There is a close relationship between phylogenetic networks and multi-labelled trees (MUL-trees). Indeed, any phylogenetic network N can be “unfolded” to obtain a MUL-tree U(N) and, conversely, a MUL-tree T can in certain circumstances be “folded” to obtain aphylogenetic network F(T) that exhibits T. In this paper, we study properties of the operations U and F in more detail. In particular, we introduce the class of stable networks, phylogenetic networks N for which F(U(N)) is isomorphic to N, characterise such networks, and show that they are related to the well-known class of tree-sibling networks. We also explore how the concept of displaying a tree in a network N can be related to displaying the tree in the MUL-tree U(N). To do this, we develop aphylogenetic analogue of graph fibrations. This allows us to view U(N) as the analogue of the universal cover of a digraph, and to establish a close connection between displaying trees in U(N) and reconciling phylogenetic trees with networks.