Tracking evolutionary trends towards increasing complexity: a case study in Cyanobacteria [article]

Andres Moya, Jose L. Oliver, Miguel Verdu, Luis Delaye, Vicente Arnau, Pedro Bernaola-Galvan, Rebeca de la Fuente, Wladimiro Diaz, Cristina Gomez-Martin, Francisco M. Gonzalez, Amparo Latorre, Ricardo Lebron (+1 others)
2020 bioRxiv   pre-print
Progressive evolution, the tendency towards increasing complexity, is a controversial issue in Biology, whose resolution requires a proper measurement of complexity. Genomes are the best entities to address this challenge, as they record the history and information gaining of organisms in their ongoing biotic and environmental interactions. Using six metrics of genome complexity, none of which is primarily associated to biological function, we measure genome complexity in 91 genomes from the
more » ... lum Cyanobacteria. Several phylogenetic analyses reveal the existence of progressive evolution towards higher genome complexity: 1) all the metrics detect strong phylogenetic signals; 2) ridge regressions detect positive trends towards higher complexity; and 3) classical proofs for progressive evolution (the minimum, the ancestor-descendent and the sub-clade tests), show that some of these positive trends are driven, being mainly due to natural selection. These findings support the existence of progressive genome evolution in this ancient and diverse group of organisms.
doi:10.1101/2020.01.29.924464 fatcat:pb55lttskvam7kkvgg2qqwgbgm