Ancient wars between microbes gave us key immune defenses | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...
New paper on @biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social: Are interphylum spiralian relationships resolvable? doi.org/10.64898/202...
@maxjtelford.bsky.social and I tried answering this question with two independent phylogenomic datasets.
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A better understanding of battles between bacteria and viruses could inspire new medicines
www.science.org
The phyla making up the major animal clade of Spiralia have been clear since the advent of molecular phylogenetics; the relationships between these spiralian phyla have not. The lack of consensus over the relationships between these important animal phyla might be a clue implying their emergence in an explosive radiation. Focusing on the five largest spiralian phyla (Annelida, Brachiopoda, Mollusca, Nemertea and Platyhelminthes) and using two phylogenomic datasets, we have applied site-bootstrapping and taxon-jackknifing to explore this example of taxonomic instability. Analyses on the 105 possible rooted trees relating them showed that interphylum branches are very short. Preference for rooting Spiralia on Platyhelminthes is a long-branch artefact. Most analyses on the 15 unrooted trees showed a preference for the same topology but the support over other solutions was non significant. We conclude that the spiralian phyla emerged in rapid succession resulting in a difficult to resolve radiation. The deep history we infer for Spiralia has wide ranging implications for our interpretation of Cambrian fossils and for the evolution of traits such as biomineralization, segmentation and larvae. Impact Statement Analyses of two independent phylogenomic datasets suggest an explosive radiation at the origin of Spiralia, with implications for understanding the groupâs evolutionary history. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.
It's publication day of my first book: The Tree of Life. The tree of life is a time machine that can take us back 4 billion years to meet our most distant ancestor. It is the magic that lets us tell the origin stories, beginning with this ancient relative, of everything from mushrooms to man.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Aude Bernheim @audeber.bsky.social and Eugene Koonin discuss one of most interesting questions in the field connecting bacterial and animal immunity!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
AlphaFold database has entered the era of complexes. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind and EBI, we use ColabFold, OpenFold and MMseqs2-GPU to predict ~31 million complexes (homo & hetro-dimers) resulting in 1.8 million high-quality predictions
đ research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass...
đ alphafold.ebi.ac.uk
Ana Serra Silva
Xing-Xing Shen
IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...
www.nature.com
Video
Cell Research - Structural genomics sheds light on protein functions and remote homologs across the insect tree of life
The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restrictionâmodification, CRISPRâCas and defensive toxinâantitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Arg...
Abstract. IQ-TREE (https://iqtree.github.io/) is a widely used open-source software tool for efficiently inferring phylogenetic trees under maximum likelih
Pleased to share our latest paper led by @tomlewin.bsky.social, now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We present the first chromosome-level genome of a phoronid and show that shared chromosomal fusions unite phoronids and bryozoans as sister groups.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
Join us in congratulating Philip J. Kranzusch (@kranzuschlab.bsky.social) of @danafarber.bsky.social and @harvardmed.bsky.social, winner of the 2026 NAS Award in Molecular Biology for his groundbreaking work advancing understanding of innate immunity! www.nasonline.org/award/nas-aw... #NASaward
