So the final session I attended I was really excited about because it's a blast from my PhD past, jumping back into microbial ecology theory and extremophiles!
Eugene Koonin from NCBI started off the session discussing complexity and simplicity in the genomic era.
Eugene Koonin from NCBI started off the session discussing complexity and simplicity in the genomic era."No one can properly define complexity [and yet] we know it when we see it."
- When we look at gene families, we find that 70-80% of genes in prokaryotic genomes are evolutionarily conserved, belong to COGs, are apart of orthologous lineages and can be considered 'distinct evolutionary units'.
- The rest we call ORFans - comprising 10-15% of genes within a genome. These can either be 'real' or errors in annotation.
- As you increase phylogenetic distance you begin to see a decay in gene content similarity
- Simplicity is 'genome streamlining'
- Complexity is 'gene accumulation'
- Larger effective population sizes are going to limit complexity due to strong selection which will lead to genome streamlining.
To learn more about Koonin's work, check out below and also his google scholar profile:
