Joana Damas

This study presents seven reference genomes of side-necked turtles, revealing chromosomal dynamics, sex chromosome evolution, and molecular mechanisms underlying skeletal innovation and cancer resistance.

The paper identifies proteins and regulatory elements associated with vocal learning by analyzing bat neural activity and epigenomic data.

FLAG is an automated genome annotation tool that improves gene structure and functional annotations for fragmented non-model genomes, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and completeness.

TOGA integrates gene annotation and orthology inference across hundreds of genomes, improving ortholog detection and creating large comparative gene resources.

A machine learning approach identifies enhancer-phenotype associations across mammals, revealing links to brain size and behavior evolution.

The paper curates TE content in 248 mammalian genomes, finding trends in recent TE accumulation and associations with dietary habits.

A 240-species placental mammal alignment resolves constraint to single bases, estimating at least 10.7% of the human genome is constrained, with 48.5% of constrained bases unannotated.

The paper uses evolutionary constraint scores to identify functional genomic regions and finds they are enriched for variants associated with common diseases.

The paper identifies bats as a hotspot for horizontal transfer of DNA transposons, finding over 200 putative elements and shared transposons across mammals and reptiles.

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.

The paper predicts the broad host range of SARS-CoV-2 by analyzing ACE2 conservation across vertebrates and identifying high-risk species.