Publications by authors named "A G Labella"
Article Synopsis
- Distantly related organisms, like cactophilic yeasts, can evolve similar traits and lifestyles to survive in comparable environments, with this study analyzing over 1,000 yeast species to understand their convergent evolution.
- Researchers found that cactophily (association with cacti) evolved independently about 17 times and could be predicted with 76% accuracy using genomic and phenotypic data, with thermotolerance being the most significant factor.
- The study also revealed horizontal gene transfer and duplications in genes related to plant cell wall degradation, indicating that these adaptive traits arose from different molecular pathways, and highlighted a potential link between cactophilic lifestyles and yeast becoming human pathogens.
Yeasts in the subphylum Saccharomycotina are found across the globe in disparate ecosystems. A major aim of yeast research is to understand the diversity and evolution of ecological traits, such as carbon metabolic breadth, insect association, and cactophily. This includes studying aspects of ecological traits like genetic architecture or association with other phenotypic traits.
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- A large study with nearly 30,000 parent-offspring pairs from Norway identified a key genetic variant in UGT1A4 that reduces jaundice risk significantly.
- The research shows different genetic factors influence neonatal jaundice compared to adult bilirubin levels, indicating unique genetic mechanisms at play.
Codon usage bias, or the unequal use of synonymous codons, is observed across genes, genomes, and between species. It has been implicated in many cellular functions, such as translation dynamics and transcript stability, but can also be shaped by neutral forces. We characterized codon usage across 1,154 strains from 1,051 species from the fungal subphylum Saccharomycotina to gain insight into the biases, molecular mechanisms, evolution, and genomic features contributing to codon usage patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany remarkable innovations have repeatedly occurred across vast evolutionary distances. When convergent traits emerge on the tree of life, they are sometimes driven by the same underlying gene families, while other times many different gene families are involved. Conversely, a gene family may be repeatedly recruited for a single trait or many different traits.
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