Wheat speciation and adaptation: perspectives from reticulate evolution

Staggered Chromosomal Hybrid Zones in the House Mouse: Relevance to Reticulate Evolution and Speciation

In the house mouse there are numerous chromosomal races distinguished by different combinations of metacentric chromosomes. These may come into contact with each other and with the ancestral all-acrocentric race, and form hybrid zones. The chromosomal clines that make up these hybrid zones may be coincident or separated from each other (staggered). Such staggered hybrid zones are interesting be...

Whole-Genome and Chromosome Evolution Associated with Host Adaptation and Speciation of the Wheat Pathogen Mycosphaerella graminicola

The fungus Mycosphaerella graminicola has been a pathogen of wheat since host domestication 10,000-12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. The wheat-infecting lineage emerged from closely related Mycosphaerella pathogens infecting wild grasses. We use a comparative genomics approach to assess how the process of host specialization affected the genome structure of M. graminicola since divergen...

Phylogenetic analysis under reticulate evolution.

The usual assumption that species have evolved from a common ancestor by a simple branching process--where each branch is genetically isolated--has been challenged by the observation of frequent hybridization between species in natural populations. In fact, most plant species are thought to have hybrid origins. This reticulate pattern of species evolution has posed problems in the definition of...

Network (Reticulate) Evolution: Biology, Models, and Algorithms

Inferring reticulate evolution networks from consensus gene trees

Motivation: A major unresolved problem in phylogeny is to reconstruct the evolutionary history of a set of species when it cannot be modeled by a simple tree. When a reticulation event, such as hybrid speciation or horizontal transfer, occurs, separate regions of a species’ genetic data may evolve along different trees. Our approach uses the gene trees for each region to solve the inverse probl...