New Zealand Next Generation Sequencing Conference - Innovative ...

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homology relationships between the references
needed to compare the results is difficult, and this
cannot be fully automated, so that this type of insilico
biological replication is seldom if ever
included in experimental designs. Here we suggest
a method for designing NGS transcriptomics
experiments that includes in-silico biological
replicates, in a way that could be automated and
included as part of a standard NGS transcriptomics
pipeline. This design would deliver stabler NGS
transcriptomics assay results robust against
common variations in reference `ome, and may
extend the applicability of NGS transcriptomics to
more highly variable species, in which NGS
expression observations obtained from alignment
to a single reference `ome may be too unreliable to
be useable.
Session 2
Hybrid origin of a parthenogenetic genus: the genomic evidence
Mary Morgan-Richards
Massey University
Biography
Mary Morgan-Richards is an academic within the
Ecology Group at Massey University, Palmerston
North. She and her research group
(http://evolves.massey.ac.nz) study speciation,
evolutionary ecology and conservation genetics
using endemic New Zealand animals (weta, stick
insects, snails). Mary gained her PhD from Victoria
University of Wellington, she then did postdoctoral
fellowships at the University of St Andrews,
Scotland, University of Otago NZ, the Natural
History Museum London UK, and University of
Canterbury NZ. She has experience working with
plants, and animals, invasive species and
endangered species and is interested in using NGS
datasets for testing theories in evolutionary biology.
Abstract
Hybridization between species can combine
divergent genomes and create new species when
reproductive isolation from parentals accompanies
the novel genome fusion (Bullini 1994). It has been
estimated that approximately 70% of plants are the
result of allopolyploidy. Hybrid species can be
recognized by the presence of alleles distinct to
two species co-occurring in the same genome.
A hybrid origin for an endemic New Zealand genus
of stick insects (Acanthoxyla) was suggested
(Morgan-Richards & Trewick 2005) with the related
bisexual species, Clitarchus hookeri, named as a
putative paternal species. A maternal bisexual
species has not been identified and is likely to be
extinct (Trewick et al. 2008; Buckley et al. 2010). It
is also likely that some lineages of Acanthoxyla are
triploid, and it is possible that Clitarchus hookeri
was not involved in the origin of all Acanthoxyla
species (Buckley et al. 2008; Myers et al. unpub).
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Next generation DNA sequencing provides large
datasets for testing hybrid origin hypotheses and
here we set out a procedure for evaluating such
data. Using de novo assembled transcripts to
compare ‘allelic’ diversity in putative hybrids and
their putative parents, we have used mRNA
sequences to examine the allelic diversity within
one Acanthoxyla lineage and compared this to
homologous gene sequences from Clitarchus
hookeri. The hybrid origin hypothesis predicts that
at each locus Acanthoxyla will contain an allele
similar to that of Clitarchus hookeri, and one allele
from the unidentified maternal ancestor. If