TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schartl, Manfred
A1  - Walter, Ronald B.
A1  - Shen, Yingjia
A1  - Garcia, Tzintzuni
A1  - Catchen, Julian
A1  - Amores, Angel
A1  - Braasch, Ingo
A1  - Chalopin, Domitille
A1  - Volff, Jean-Nicolas
A1  - Lesch, Klaus-Peter
A1  - Bisazza, Angelo
A1  - Minx, Pat
A1  - Hillier, LaDeana
A1  - Wilson, Richard K.
A1  - Fürstenberg, Susan
A1  - Boore, Jeffrey
A1  - Searle, Steve
A1  - Postlethwait, John H.
A1  - Warren, Wesley C.
T1  - The genome of the platyfish, Xiphophorus maculatus, provides insights into evolutionary adaptation and several complex traits
JF  - Nature Genetics
N2  - Several attributes intuitively considered to be typical mammalian features, such as complex behavior, live birth and malignant disease such as cancer, also appeared several times independently in lower vertebrates. The genetic mechanisms underlying the evolution of these elaborate traits are poorly understood. The platyfish, X. maculatus, offers a unique model to better understand the molecular biology of such traits. We report here the sequencing of the platyfish genome. Integrating genome assembly with extensive genetic maps identified an unexpected evolutionary stability of chromosomes in fish, in contrast to in mammals. Genes associated with viviparity show signatures of positive selection, identifying new putative functional domains and rare cases of parallel evolution. We also find that genes implicated in cognition show an unexpectedly high rate of duplicate gene retention after the teleost genome duplication event, suggesting a hypothesis for the evolution of the behavioral complexity in fish, which exceeds that found in amphibians and reptiles.
KW  - genomics
KW  - genomic analysis
KW  - evolutionary biology
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-132152
VL  - 45
IS  - 5
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schultz, Jörg
A1  - Keller, Daniela Barbara
T1  - Connectivity, Not Frequency, Determines the Fate of a Morpheme
JF  - PLoS ONE
N2  - Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examined the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We found that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency). This contrasts words, whose survival is determined by their frequency of usage. We therefore identified features of morphemes which are not dictated by the statistical properties of words. As morphemes are also relevant for the mental representation of words, this result might enable establishing a link between an individual’s perception of language and historical language change.
KW  - confidence intervals
KW  - evolutionary biology
KW  - culture
KW  - language
KW  - lexicography
KW  - linguistic morphology
KW  - network analysis
KW  - psycholinguistics
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-97039
ER  -