OEB Seminar Series

Laura Katz
Smith College
"Through the Looking Glass: Insights into the Biodiversity of Eukaryotes through Phylogenomic Analyses and Single-cell ‘omics'"
Host: Cavanaugh Lab

Abstract:  We live on a microbial planet as microbes dominate in terms of biodiversity, biomass and biological innovations. Yet many microbial lineages have been understudied, in part because most are currently uncultivable.  Our knowledge of microbial diversity is now being transformed by advances in technologies for characterizing genome-scale data.  My laboratory has generated genomic and transcriptomic data from diverse microbial eukaryotes, and then combined these data with sequences from public databases to build >13,000 gene trees from ~800 lineages (broadly sampled eukaryotes plus representative bacteria and archaea).  We have analyzed the resulting phylogenomic datasets to: 1) create a robust eukaryotic tree of life consisting of five major lineages plus numerous ‘orphans’; 2) estimate the tempo of interdomain lateral gene transfer events across the ~1.8 billion years of eukaryotic evolution; and 3) map the evolutionary history of genes along chromosomes, using Plasmodium falciparum as a model.  Preliminary analyses of our single-cell transcriptome and genome data highlight the power of these methods for both gene discovery, and for uncovering unusual genome features among eukaryotes.  All of this supports Robert W. Hegner’s (1938) assertion that: “Alice might have seen something even more wonderful if she had looked through a microscope instead of through a looking glass.”

 Hegner R.W. 1938. Big Fleas have Little Fleas or Who's Who Among the Protozoa. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.