Science, Space and Technology News 2024
An international team has developed the most comprehensive bird family tree, covering 93 million years and 92% of bird families, using advanced computational methods and supercomputing resources. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Researchers observed sharp increases in effective population size, substitution rates, and relative brain size in early birds, shedding new light on the adaptive mechanisms that drove avian diversification in the aftermath of this pivotal event. In the companion paper published in, researchers closely examined one of the branches of the new family tree and found that flamingos and doves are more distantly related than previous genome-wide analyses had shown.
The researchers then examined the evolutionary history of individual segments across the genome. From there, they pieced together a mosaic of gene trees, which were then compiled into a comprehensive species tree. This meticulous approach enabled the researchers to construct a new and improved bird family tree that delineates complex branching events with remarkable precision and detail, even in cases of historical uncertainty.
The team’s ability to conduct these analyses on massive datasets was made possible because Mirarab’s lab designed their computational methods to run on powerful GPU machines. They ran their calculations on the“We were fortunate to have access to such a high-end supercomputer,” said Mirarab. “Without, we would not have been able to run and rerun our analyses on such large datasets in a reasonable amount of time.
This anomaly initially led the researchers to incorrectly group flamingos and doves together as evolutionary cousins, for they appeared closely related based on this unchanged section of. That’s because their previous analysis was based on the genomes of 48 bird species. But by repeating their analysis using the genomes of 363 species, a more accurate family tree emerged that moved doves further from flamingos.
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