2022
Authors
Egeter, B; Verissimo, J; Lopes Lima, M; Chaves, C; Pinto, J; Riccardi, N; Beja, P; Fonseca, NA;
Publication
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY RESOURCES
Abstract
Traditional detection of aquatic invasive species via morphological identification is often time-consuming and can require a high level of taxonomic expertise, leading to delayed mitigation responses. Environmental DNA (eDNA) detection approaches of multiple species using Illumina-based sequencing technology have been used to overcome these hindrances, but sample processing is often lengthy. More recently, portable nanopore sequencing technology has become available, which has the potential to make molecular detection of invasive species more widely accessible and substantially decrease sample turnaround times. However, nanopore-sequenced reads have a much higher error rate than those produced by Illumina platforms, which has so far hindered the adoption of this technology. We provide a detailed laboratory protocol and bioinformatic tools (msi package) to increase the reliability of nanopore sequencing to detect invasive species, and we test its application using invasive bivalves while comparing it with Illumina-based sequencing. We sampled water from sites with pre-existing bivalve occurrence and abundance data, and contrasting bivalve communities, in Italy and Portugal. Samples were extracted, amplified, and sequenced by the two platforms. The mean agreement between sequencing methods was 69% and the difference between methods was nonsignificant. The lack of detections of some species at some sites could be explained by their known low abundances. This is the first reported use of MinION to detect aquatic invasive species from eDNA samples.
2023
Authors
Guedes, JG; Ribeiro, R; Carqueijeiro, I; Guimaraes, AL; Bispo, C; Archer, J; Azevedo, H; Fonseca, NA; Sottomayor, M;
Publication
Abstract
2012
Authors
Fonseca, NA; Rung, J; Brazma, A; Marioni, JC;
Publication
BIOINFORMATICS
Abstract
Motivation: A ubiquitous and fundamental step in high-throughput sequencing analysis is the alignment (mapping) of the generated reads to a reference sequence. To accomplish this task numerous software tools have been proposed. Determining the mappers that are most suitable for a specific application is not trivial. Results: This survey focuses on classifying mappers through a wide number of characteristics. The goal is to allow practitioners to compare the mappers more easily and find those that are most suitable for their specific problem.
2008
Authors
Vieira, J; Fonseca, NA; Santos, RAM; Habu, T; Tao, R; Vieira, CP;
Publication
GENETICS RESEARCH
Abstract
In gametophytic self-incompatibility systems, many specificities (different 'lock-and-key' combinations) are maintained by frequency-dependent selection for very long evolutionary times. In Solanaceae, trans-specific evolution (the observation that an allele from one species may be more closely related to an allele from another species than to others from the same species) has been taken as an argument for the very old age of specificities. In this work, by determining, for the first time, the age of extant Prunus species, we show that this reasoning cannot be applied to Prunoideae. Furthermore, since our sample size is large (all S-RNase encoding the female component and SFB encoding the male component GenBank sequences), we were able to estimate the age of the oldest Prunus specificities. By doing so, we show that the lower variability levels at the Prunus S-locus, in comparison with Solanaceae, is due to the younger age of Prunus alleles, and not to a difference in silent mutation rates. We show that the ancestor to extant Prunus species harboured at least 102 specificities, in contrast to the maximum of 33 observed in extant Prunus species. Since the number of specificities that can be maintained in a population depends on the effective population size, this observation suggests a bottleneck in Prunus evolutionary history. Loss of specificities may have occurred during this event. Using only information on amino acid sites that determine specificity differences, and a simulation approach, we show that a model that assumes closely related specificities are not preferentially lost during evolution, fails to predict the observed degree of specificity relatedness.
2012
Authors
Reboiro-Jato, D; Reboiro-Jato, M; Fdez-Riverola, F; Vieira, CP; Fonseca, NA; Vieira, J;
Publication
Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics
Abstract
2012
Authors
Jato, DavidReboiro; Jato, MiguelReboiro; Riverola, FlorentinoFdez; Vieira, Cristina; Fonseca, NunoA.; Vieira, Jorge;
Publication
J. Integrative Bioinformatics
Abstract
Maximum-likelihood methods based on models of codon substitution have been widely used to infer positively selected amino acid sites that are responsible for adaptive changes. Nevertheless, in order to use such an approach, software applications are required to align protein and DNA sequences, infer a phylogenetic tree and run the maximum-likelihood models. Therefore, a significant effort is made in order to prepare input files for the different software applications and in the analysis of the output of every analysis. In this paper we present the ADOPS (Automatic Detection Of Positively Selected Sites) software. It was developed with the goal of providing an automatic and flexible tool for detecting positively selected sites given a set of unaligned nucleotide sequence data. An example of the usefulness of such a pipeline is given by showing, under different conditions, positively selected amino acid sites in a set of 54 Coffea putative S-RNase sequences. ADOPS software is freely available and can be downloaded from http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/ADOPS.
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