Laurent Duret

This study shows that ciliates can break species barriers through recurrent horizontal gene transfer from highly divergent lineages, resulting in viable offspring.

The study identifies functional PRDM9 orthologs in cnidarians, revealing evolutionary dynamics and suggesting an ancient origin of PRDM9 function.

The paper reports the genome of Paramecium aurelia, revealing tiny germline chromosomes with an exceptionally high recombination rate and a new class of Helitrons at their ends.

The paper examines translational selection across 223 metazoan species, finding weak evidence of codon optimization in mammals and a correlation between population size and selection intensity.

This study identifies PRDM9's role in driving recombination hotspots in salmonids, showing rapid evolution and conservation of its function across vertebrates.

GTDrift provides a resource analyzing genetic drift and genomic/transcriptomic features across 1,506 eukaryotic species, including life history traits, dN/dS ratios, and processed RNA-seq data for comparative studies.

The paper quantifies Prdm9-independent recombination hotspots in 52 mammals, finding that these hotspots are common and often coexist with Prdm9-directed hotspots.

The paper investigates the evolutionary origin of Internal Eliminated Sequences (IESs) in Paramecium genomes, showing transposable elements drive their proliferation and diversification.

The paper estimates synonymous and non-synonymous substitution rates while accounting for non-stationary base composition, showing that non-stationarity biases estimates and proposing methods to correct for it.

The paper quantifies the fraction of alternative splicing events that are errors by analyzing transcriptomes of Paramecium tetraurelia and humans, finding that 92%-98% of splice variants in medium-expressed genes are errors.