Baby Genomics: Tracing the Evolutionary Changes That Gave Rise to Placentation.

It has long been challenging to uncover the molecular mechanisms behind striking morphological innovations such as mammalian pregnancy. We studied the power of a robust comparative orthology pipeline based on gene synteny to address such problems. We inferred orthology relations between human genes and genes from each of 43 other vertebrate genomes, resulting in ∼18,000 orthologous pairs for each genome comparison.

Diet shifts provoke complex and variable changes in the metabolic networks of the ruminal microbiome.

Background: Grazing mammals rely on their ruminal microbial symbionts to convert plant structural biomass into metabolites they can assimilate. To explore how this complex metabolic system adapts to the host animal's diet, we inferred a microbiome-level metabolic network from shotgun metagenomic data.

Results: Using comparative genomics, we then linked this microbial network to that of the host animal using a set of interface metabolites likely to be transferred to the host.