The calamoid palms 🌴 have over 500 species spread across the world, but their higher-level relationships were a bit of a mystery. Until now.

Out today in #MolecularPhylogeneticsAndEvolution:

A robust phylogenomic framework for the calamoid palms https://t.co/JiCbSUlheH

1/10

First some background info, so that you know what we are talking about:

Calamoid palms look a bit like snakes 🐍 (don't they!?!), because their fruits are covered in overlapping scales. And with their often fierce spines, they are equally fearsome. 😱

2/10
They are classified into 17 genera, 10 subtribes and 3 tribes. They have an amazing variety of growth forms, from stemless to climbing to tree habit. 🌱🌴

3/10
But as I said, their relationships have been a bit of a mystery. Here's the varying relationships previous studies found over the last 20 years.

4/10
We tackled this mystery with a phylogenomic approach: we sampled almost a thousand genes (a hundred times more than previous studies!) of 75 species representing all calamoid tribes, subtribes and genera.

The resulting data matrix is pretty massive...

5/10
With all this data, we were able to reconstruct the higher-level relationships with new confidence, and these results were stable no matter what method we used (we tried out quite a few...). Here's the strict consensus tree from all eight species trees we made.

6/10
How strong is gene tree conflict in our dataset?

For relationships among tribes and subtribes, a clear majority of gene trees supported the main topology. That's why we think that our results are very robust on that level.

7/10
However, in subtribes Ancistrophyllinae and Plectocomiinae, there was a lot of gene tree conflict - similar proportions of gene trees support the 3 different possible relationships among genera.

Why? Hybridisation? Incomplete lineage sorting?

Further research needed!

8/10
Finally, a huge thanks to my fantastic supervisors @BillJBaker, @w_eiserhardt, @Chomicki_G and Simon Hiscock (@OxfordPlants), and all other (equally great) co-authors: @SidonieBellot, @RowanSchley, @tlpcouvreur, and palm legends John Dransfield and Andrew Henderson.

9/10
If you want to read more, feel free to use the below link for free access to the paper - it will work until 13 March 2021.

https://t.co/JiCbSUlheH

10/10

More from Science

https://t.co/hXlo8qgkD0
Look like that they got a classical case of PCR Cross-Contamination.
They had 2 fabricated samples (SRX9714436 and SRX9714921) on the same PCR run. Alongside with Lung07. They did not perform metagenomic sequencing on the “feces” and they did not get


A positive oral or anal swab from anywhere in their sampling. Feces came from anus and if these were positive the anal swabs must also be positive. Clearly it got there after the NA have been extracted and were from the very low-level degraded RNA which were mutagenized from

The Taq.
https://t.co/yKXCgiT29w to see SRX9714921 and SRX9714436.
Human+Mouse in the positive SRA, human in both of them. Seeing human+mouse in identical proportions across 3 different sequencers (PRJNA573298, A22, SEX9714436) are pretty straight indication that the originals

Were already contaminated with Human and mouse from the very beginning, and that this contamination is due to dishonesty in the sample handling process which prescribe a spiking of samples in ACE2-HEK293T/A549, VERO E6 and Human lung xenograft mouse.

The “lineages” they claimed to have found aren’t mutational lineages at all—all the mutations they see on these sequences were unique to that specific sequence, and are the result of RNA degradation and from the Taq polymerase errors accumulated from the nested PCR process
💥and so it begins..💥
It's time, my friends 🤩🤩

[Thread] #ProjectOdin


https://t.co/fO90N78fta


new quantum-based internet #ElonMusk #QVS #QFS

Political justification ⏬⏬
#ProjectOdin


#ProjectOdin #Starlink #ElonMusk #QuantumInternet
Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

https://t.co/mzS7vVSREJ

https://t.co/353PdAX2fa

https://t.co/3yBImjOdd4

In some cases, almost 100% of the light energy can be converted to the second harmonic frequency. These cases typically involve intense pulsed laser beams passing through large crystals, and careful alignment to obtain phase matching.

You May Also Like