To provide context for the diversification of archosaurs—the group that includes crocodilians, dinosaurs, and birds—we generated draft genomes of three crocodilians:Alligator mississippiensis(the American alligator),Crocodylus porosus(the saltwater crocodile), andGavialis gangeticus(the Indian gharial). We observed an exceptionally slow rate of genome evolution within crocodilians at all levels, including nucleotide substitutions, indels, transposable element content and movement, gene family evolution, and chromosomal synteny. When placed within the context of related taxa including birds and turtles, this suggests that the common ancestor of all of these taxa also exhibited slow genome evolution and that the comparatively rapid evolution is derived in birds. The data also provided the opportunity to analyze heterozygosity in crocodilians, which indicates a likely reduction in population size for all three taxa through the Pleistocene. Finally, these data combined with newly published bird genomes allowed us to reconstruct the partial genome of the common ancestor of archosaurs, thereby providing a tool to investigate the genetic starting material of crocodilians, birds, and dinosaurs.

Transposable elements (TEs) are selfish genetic elements that mobilize in genomes via transposition or retrotransposition and often make up large fractions of vertebrate genomes. Here, we review the current understanding of vertebrate TE diversity and evolution in the context of recent advances in genome sequencing and assembly techniques. TEs make up 4–60% of assembled vertebrate genomes, and deeply branching lineages such as ray-finned fishes and amphibians generally exhibit a higher TE diversity than the more recent radiations of birds and mammals. Furthermore, the list of taxa with exceptional TE landscapes is growing. We emphasize that the current bottleneck in genome analyses lies in the proper annotation of TEs and provide examples where superficial analyses led to misleading conclusions about genome evolution. Finally, recent advances in long-read sequencing will soon permit access to TE-rich genomic regions that previously resisted assembly including the gigantic, TE-rich genomes of salamanders and lungfishes.

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile genetic elements with the ability to replicate themselves throughout the host genome. In some taxa TEs reach copy numbers in hundreds of thousands and can occupy more than half of the genome. The increasing number of reference genomes from nonmodel species has begun to outpace efforts to identify and annotate TE content and methods that are used vary significantly between projects. Here, we demonstrate variation that arises in TE annotations when less than optimal methods are used. We found that across a variety of taxa, the ability to accurately identify TEs based solely on homology decreased as the phylogenetic distance between the queried genome and a reference increased. Next we annotated repeats using homology alone, as is often the case in new genome analyses, and a combination of homology and de novo methods as well as an additional manual curation step. Reannotation using these methods identified a substantial number of new TE subfamilies in previously characterized genomes, recognized a higher proportion of the genome as repetitive, and decreased the average genetic distance within TE families, implying recent TE accumulation. Finally, these finding—increased recognition of younger TEs—were confirmed via an analysis of the postman butterfly ( Heliconius melpomene ). These observations imply that complete TE annotation relies on a combination of homology and de novo–based repeat identification, manual curation, and classification and that relying on simple, homology-based methods is insufficient to accurately describe the TE landscape of a newly sequenced genome.

We examined transposable element (TE) content of 248 placental mammal genome assemblies, the largest de novo TE curation effort in eukaryotes to date. We found that although mammals resemble one another in total TE content and diversity, they show substantial differences with regard to recent TE accumulation. This includes multiple recent expansion and quiescence events across the mammalian tree. Young TEs, particularly long interspersed elements, drive increases in genome size, whereas DNA transposons are associated with smaller genomes. Mammals tend to accumulate only a few types of TEs at any given time, with one TE type dominating. We also found association between dietary habit and the presence of DNA transposon invasions. These detailed annotations will serve as a benchmark for future comparative TE analyses among placental mammals.

The rapid diversification of Myotis bats into more than 100 species is one of the most extensive mammalian radiations available for study. Efforts to understand relationships within Myotis have primarily utilized mitochondrial markers and trees inferred from nuclear markers lacked resolution. Our current understanding of relationships within Myotis is therefore biased towards a set of phylogenetic markers that may not reflect the history of the nuclear genome. To resolve this, we sequenced the full mitochondrial genomes of 37 representative Myotis, primarily from the New World, in conjunction with targeted sequencing of 3648 ultraconserved elements (UCEs). We inferred the phylogeny and explored the effects of concatenation and summary phylogenetic methods, as well as combinations of markers based on informativeness or levels of missing data, on our results. Of the 294 phylogenies generated from the nuclear UCE data, all are significantly different from phylogenies inferred using mitochondrial genomes. Even within the nuclear data, quartet frequencies indicate that around half of all UCE loci conflict with the estimated species tree. Several factors can drive such conflict, including incomplete lineage sorting, introgressive hybridization, or even phylogenetic error. Despite the degree of discordance between nuclear UCE loci and the mitochondrial genome and among UCE loci themselves, the most common nuclear topology is recovered in one quarter of all analyses with strong nodal support. Based on these results, we re-examine the evolutionary history of Myotis to better understand the phenomena driving their unique nuclear, mitochondrial, and biogeographic histories.