Segregation Between an Ornamental and a Disease Driver Gene Provides Insights Into Pigment Cell Regulation.

Genetic interactions are adaptive within a species. Hybridization can disrupt such species-specific genetic interactions and creates novel interactions that alter the hybrid progeny overall fitness. Hybrid incompatibility, which refers to degenerative genetic interactions that decrease the overall hybrid survival and sterility, is one of the results from combining two diverged genomes in hybrids.

Segregation between an ornamental and a disease driver gene provides insights into pigment cell regulation.

Unlabelled: Genetic interactions are adaptive within a species. Hybridization can disrupt such species-specific genetic interactions and creates novel interactions that alter the hybrid progeny overall fitness. Hybrid incompatibility, which refers to degenerative genetic interactions that decrease the overall hybrid survival, is one of the results from combining two diverged genomes in hybrids.

Transcriptional background effects on a tumor driver gene in different pigment cell types of medaka.

The Xiphophorus melanoma receptor kinase gene, xmrk, is a bona fide oncogene driving melanocyte tumorigenesis of Xiphophorus fish. When ectopically expressed in medaka, it not only induces development of several pigment cell tumor types in different strains of medaka but also induces different tumor types within the same animal, suggesting its oncogenic activity has a transcriptomic background effect. Although the central pathways that xmrk utilizes to lead to melanomagenesis are well documented, genes and genetic pathways that modulate the oncogenic effect and alter the course of disease have not been studied so far.

Assessment of various standard fish diets on gut microbiome of platyfish Xiphophorus maculatus.

Diet is an external factor that affects the physiological baseline of research animals. It can shape gut microbiome, which can impact the host. As a result, dietary variation can challenge experimental reproducibility and data integration across studies when not appropriately considered.

High resolution genomes of multiple species provide new insights into microevolution, hybrid incompatibility, and epistasis.

Because of diverged adaptative phenotypes, fish species of the genus have contributed to a wide range of research for a century. Existing genome assemblies are not at the chromosomal level and are prone to sequence gaps, thus hindering advancement of the intra- and inter-species differences for evolutionary, comparative, and translational biomedical studies. Herein, we assembled high-quality chromosome-level genome assemblies for three distantly related species, namely, , , and Our overall goal is to precisely assess microevolutionary processes in the clade to ascertain molecular events that led to the divergence of the species and to progress understanding of genetic incompatibility to disease.