The lab has been working remotely since March, but there are still a lot of updates!
1) Our Mammalian Cancer Gene manuscript was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution and is available open access. We looked at duplication patterns in 548 human cancer genes across 63 mammalian genome assemblies and found that across mammals longevity predicts the copy numbers of tumor suppressor genes that contain both somatic and germline mutations in human cancers. This suggests that the evolution of long lifespans is accompanied by strong selection against both sporadic and hereditary cancers in mammals.
2) The tuatara genome paper was published in Nature! This was a multi-year internationally collaborative effort led by Dr. Neil Gemmell from University of Otago in New Zealand. The Tollis Lab played a large role in this consortium, and led the phylogenomic and molecular clock analyses. We used full-scale comparative genomic data for the first time to determine that the closest relatives of the tuatara are lizards and snakes (squamates), and that these groups last shared a common ancestor ~250 million years ago. We also show that contrary to previous claims, the tuatara has evolved quite slowly at the molecular level, lending at least some evidence to the idea that it is indeed a “living fossil”. In addition to publishing the manuscript, Nature produced a very nice News and Notes piece that describes the effort and results of this project.
3) We have a new preprint available, that using elephant genomics to understand why elephant species are differentially susceptible to many types of diseases, including herpesvirus, tuberculosis, and cancer. The manuscript is in review now.
4) Another manuscript we worked on is currently available as a preprint as well, which describes the genome assembly of the eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus). Our contribution to this work included sequencing the transcriptome of this lizard, which was used to annotate the highly contiguous and high quality genome assembly. This manuscript is in review now.