Project description:Monitoring microbial communities can aid in understanding the state of these habitats. Environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques provide efficient and comprehensive monitoring by capturing broader diversity. Besides structural profiling, eDNA methods allow the study of functional profiles, encompassing the genes within the microbial community. In this study, three methodologies were compared for functional profiling of microbial communities in estuarine and coastal sites in the Bay of Biscay. The methodologies included inference from 16S metabarcoding data using Tax4Fun, GeoChip microarrays, and shotgun metagenomics.
Project description:We examine how different transcriptional network structures can evolve from an ancestral network. We show that regulatory protein modularity, conversion of one cis-regulatory sequence to another, distribution of binding energy among protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions, and exploitation of ancestral network features all contribute to the evolution of a novel mode of regulation at a conserved gene set. The formation of this derived mode of regulation did not disrupt the ancestral mode and thereby created a hybrid regulatory state where both means of transcription regulation (ancestral and derived) contribute to the conserved expression pattern of the network. Finally, we show how this hybrid regulatory state has resolved in different ways in different lineages to generate the diversity of regulatory network structures observed in modern species.
Project description:We examine how different transcriptional network structures can evolve from a common, ancestral network. We show that regulatory protein modularity, conversion of one cis-regulatory sequence to another, distribution of binding energy among protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions, and exploitation of ancestral network features all contribute to the evolution of a novel mode of regulation at a conserved gene set. The formation of this derived mode of regulation did not disrupt the ancestral mode and thereby created a hybrid regulatory state where both means of transcription regulation (ancestral and derived) contribute to the conserved expression pattern of the network. Finally, we show how this hybrid regulatory state has resolved in different ways in different lineages to generate the diversity of regulatory network structures observed in modern species.