Iliana Bista

The Vertebrate Genomes Project Phase I provides high-quality reference genomes for 816 species, enabling evolutionary and conservation insights across vertebrates.

The paper presents a new phased assembly of the Antarctic spiny plunderfish and identifies genomic features linked to cold adaptation in notothenioids.

This study investigates genomic convergence in Mediterranean clingfishes adapting to intertidal gravel beaches, finding no large-scale convergence but identifying candidate regions associated with morphological traits.

The paper investigates how temperature and pressure influenced the evolution of antifreeze proteins (AFPs) in polar and deep sea fishes, showing that AFP III copy number expands under low temperature but decreases with depth.

The paper analyzes 1,375 Malawi cichlid genomes to show that sex-linked chromosomal inversions drive adaptive speciation through introgression and selection on neuro-sensory, physiological, and reproductive genes.

The paper describes the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) pilot project, which tests a decentralized model for producing high-quality reference genomes across 98 European species.

The paper generates and analyzes genome assemblies for 24 Antarctic notothenioid fish species to study cold adaptations, identifying genomic changes related to antifreeze proteins and haemoglobin loss.

The paper benchmarks DNA preservation methods for long-read and long-range sequencing across vertebrates, finding that optimal methods vary by taxa, tissue, and application.

The paper examines transcriptional activity and epigenetic regulation of transposable elements in the symbiotic fungus Rhizophagus irregularis, finding evidence of TE activity and epigenomic regulation.

The paper develops a pipeline for mitochondrial genome assembly and identifies errors and novel duplications in reference mitogenomes.

The paper summarizes methods and lessons from assembling 16 vertebrate genomes, highlights the importance of long-read sequencing, and introduces the Vertebrate Genomes Project to generate complete reference genomes for all vertebrate species.