Dynamics and Impacts of Transposable Element Proliferation in the Drosophila nasuta Species Group Radiation

Transposable element (TE) mobilization is a constant threat to genome integrity. Eukaryotic organisms have evolved robust defensive mechanisms to suppress their activity, yet TEs can escape suppression and proliferate, creating strong selective pressure for host defense to adapt. This genomic conflict fuels a never-ending arms race that drives the rapid evolution of TEs and recurrent positive selection of genes involved in host defense; the latter has been shown to contribute to postzygotic hybrid incompatibility. However, how TE proliferation impacts genome and regulatory divergence remains poorly understood. Here, we report the highly complete and contiguous (N50 = 33.8–38.0 Mb) genome assemblies of seven closely related Drosophila species that belong to the nasuta species group—a poorly studied group of flies that radiated in the last 2 My. We constructed a high-quality de novo TE library and gathered germline RNA-seq data, which allowed us to comprehensively annotate and compare TE insertion patterns between the species, and infer the evolutionary forces controlling their spread. We find a strong negative association between TE insertion frequency and expression of genes nearby; this likely reflects survivor bias from reduced fitness impact of TEs inserting near lowly expressed, nonessential genes, with limited TE-induced epigenetic silencing. Phylogenetic analyses of insertions of 147 TE families reveal that 53% of them show recent amplification in at least one species. The most highly amplified TE is a nonautonomous DNA element (Drosophila INterspersed Element; DINE) which has gone through multiple bouts of expansions with thousands of full-length copies littered throughout each genome. Across all TEs, we find that TEs expansions are significantly associated with high expression in the expanded species consistent with suppression escape. Thus, whereas horizontal transfer followed by the invasion of a naïve genome has been highlighted to explain the long-term survival of TEs, our analysis suggests that evasion of host suppression of resident TEs is a major strategy to persist over evolutionary times. Altogether, our results shed light on the heterogenous and context-dependent nature in which TEs affect gene regulation and the dynamics of rampant TE proliferation amidst a recently radiated species group.     

Direct observation of genomic heterogeneity through local haplotyping analysis

Background

It has been an abiding belief among geneticists that multicellular organisms’ genomes can be analyzed under the assumption that a single individual has a uniform genome in all its cells. Despite some evidence to the contrary, this belief has been used as an axiomatic assumption in most genome analysis software packages. In this paper we present observations in human whole genome data, human whole exome data and in mouse whole genome data to challenge this assumption. We show that heterogeneity is in fact ubiquitous and readily observable in ordinary Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data.

Results

Starting with the assumption that a single NGS read (or read pair) must come from one haplotype, we built a procedure for directly observing haplotypes at a local level by examining 2 or 3 adjacent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are close enough on the genome to be spanned by individual reads. We applied this procedure to NGS data from three different sources: whole genome of a Central European trio from the 1000 genomes project, whole genome data from laboratory-bred strains of mouse, and whole exome data from a set of patients of head and neck tumors. Thousands of loci were found in each genome where reads spanning 2 or 3 SNPs displayed more than two haplotypes, indicating that the locus is heterogeneous. We show that such loci are ubiquitous in the genome and cannot be explained by segmental duplications. We explain them on the basis of cellular heterogeneity at the genomic level. Such heterogeneous loci were found in all normal and tumor genomes examined.

Conclusions

Our results highlight the need for new methods to analyze genomic variation because existing ones do not systematically consider local haplotypes. Identification of cancer somatic mutations is complicated because of tumor heterogeneity. It is further complicated if, as we show, normal tissues are also heterogeneous. Methods for biomarker discovery must consider contextual haplotype information rather than just whether a variant “is present”.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-418) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Ultra-fast local-haplotype variant calling using paired-end DNA-sequencing data reveals somatic mosaicism in tumor and normal blood samples

Somatic mosaicism refers to the existence of somatic mutations in a fraction of somatic cells in a single biological sample. Its importance has mainly been discussed in theory although experimental work has started to emerge linking somatic mosaicism to disease diagnosis. Through novel statistical modeling of paired-end DNA-sequencing data using blood-derived DNA from healthy donors as well as DNA from tumor samples, we present an ultra-fast computational pipeline, LocHap that searches for multiple single nucleotide variants (SNVs) that are scaffolded by the same reads. We refer to scaffolded SNVs as local haplotypes (LH). When an LH exhibits more than two genotypes, we call it a local haplotype variant (LHV). The presence of LHVs is considered evidence of somatic mosaicism because a genetically homogeneous cell population will not harbor LHVs. Applying LocHap to whole-genome and whole-exome sequence data in DNA from normal blood and tumor samples, we find wide-spread LHVs across the genome. Importantly, we find more LHVs in tumor samples than in normal samples, and more in older adults than in younger ones. We confirm the existence of LHVs and somatic mosaicism by validation studies in normal blood samples. LocHap is publicly available at http://www.compgenome.org/lochap.     

Synthesis and glycosidase inhibitory activity of novel (2-phenyl-4H-benzopyrimedo[2,1-b]-thiazol-4-yliden)acetonitrile derivatives

A series of (2-phenyl-4H-benzopyrimodo[2,1-b][1,3]thiazol-4-yliden-4-yliden)acetonitrile derivatives have been prepared by ring transformation reaction of 4-(methylthio)-2-oxo-6-aryl-2H-pyrane-3-carbonitriles. The yield of ring transformation product is moderate to good. Furthermore the glycosidase inhibitory activities were tested by using α-amylase and α-glucosidase pancreatic, intestinal and liver enzymes, responsible for hyperglycemia in type II diabetes. The results revealed that all compounds exhibit significant glycosidase inhibitory activity.