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  1. Phadke, Sujal (Ed.)
    Abstract Advances in phylogenomics and high-throughput sequencing have allowed the reconstruction of deep phylogenetic relationships in the evolution of eukaryotes. Yet, the root of the eukaryotic tree of life remains elusive. The most popular hypothesis in textbooks and reviews is a root between Unikonta (Opisthokonta + Amoebozoa) and Bikonta (all other eukaryotes), which emerged from analyses of a single-gene fusion. Subsequent, highly cited studies based on concatenation of genes supported this hypothesis with some variations or proposed a root within Excavata. However, concatenation of genes does not consider phylogenetically-informative events like gene duplications and losses. A recent study using gene tree parsimony (GTP) suggested the root lies between Opisthokonta and all other eukaryotes, but only including 59 taxa and 20 genes. Here we use GTP with a duplication-loss model in a gene-rich and taxon-rich dataset (i.e., 2,786 gene families from two sets of 155 and 158 diverse eukaryotic lineages) to assess the root, and we iterate each analysis 100 times to quantify tree space uncertainty. We also contrasted our results and discarded alternative hypotheses from the literature using GTP and the likelihood-based method SpeciesRax. Our estimates suggest a root between Fungi or Opisthokonta and all other eukaryotes; but based on further analysis of genome size, we propose that the root between Opisthokonta and all other eukaryotes is the most likely. 
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  2. Abstract Motivation

    Single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) are the most common variations in the human genome. Recently developed methods for SNV detection from single-cell DNA sequencing data, such as SCIΦ and scVILP, leverage the evolutionary history of the cells to overcome the technical errors associated with single-cell sequencing protocols. Despite being accurate, these methods are not scalable to the extensive genomic breadth of single-cell whole-genome (scWGS) and whole-exome sequencing (scWES) data.

    Results

    Here, we report on a new scalable method, Phylovar, which extends the phylogeny-guided variant calling approach to sequencing datasets containing millions of loci. Through benchmarking on simulated datasets under different settings, we show that, Phylovar outperforms SCIΦ in terms of running time while being more accurate than Monovar (which is not phylogeny-aware) in terms of SNV detection. Furthermore, we applied Phylovar to two real biological datasets: an scWES triple-negative breast cancer data consisting of 32 cells and 3375 loci as well as an scWGS data of neuron cells from a normal human brain containing 16 cells and approximately 2.5 million loci. For the cancer data, Phylovar detected somatic SNVs with high or moderate functional impact that were also supported by bulk sequencing dataset and for the neuron dataset, Phylovar identified 5745 SNVs with non-synonymous effects some of which were associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

    Availability and implementation

    Phylovar is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/NakhlehLab/Phylovar.

     
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