Genomic basis of drought resistance inFagus sylvatica

In the course of global climate change, central Europe is experiencing more frequent and prolonged periods of drought. These drought events have severe and detrimental impacts on the forest ecosystem. The drought years 2018 and 2019 affected European beeches (Fagus sylvatica L.) in noticeably different ways: even in the same local stand, badly drought damaged trees immediately neighboured apparently healthy trees. This led to the hypothesis that the genotype rather than the environment was responsible for this conspicuous pattern. We used this natural experiment to study the genomic basis of drought resistance in a Pool-GWAS approach. Contrasting the extreme phenotypes, we identified 106 si…

tbg - a new file format for genomic data

AbstractMotivationThe question of determining whether a Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) or a variant in general leads to a change in the amino acid sequence of a protein coding gene is often a laborious and time-consuming challenge. Here, we introduce the tbg file format for storing genomic data and tbg-tools, a user-friendly toolbox for the faster analysis of SNPs. The file format stores information for each nucleotide in each gene, allowing to predict which change in the amino acid sequence will be caused by a variant in the nucleotide sequence. Our new tool therefore has the potential to make biological sense of the unprecedented amount of genome-wide genetic variation that research…

Author response: Genomic basis for drought resistance in European beech forests threatened by climate change

ModEst - Precise estimation of genome size from NGS data

AbstractPrecise estimates of genome sizes are important parameters for both theoretical and practical biodiversity genomics. We present here a fast, easy-to-implement and precise method to estimate genome size from the number of bases sequenced and the mean sequence coverage. To estimate the latter, we take advantage of the fact that a precise estimation of the Poisson distribution parameter lambda is possible from truncated data, restricted to the part of the coverage distribution representing the true underlying distribution. With simulations we could show that reasonable genome size estimates can be gained even from low-coverage (10X), highly discontinuous genome drafts. Comparison of es…