A research team of CIIMAR, led by Agostinho Antunes, participated in an international consortium that sequenced, assembled and compared the complete genomes of 48 species of birds (crow, duck, parakeet, falcon, woodpecker, eagle, owl and many others) producing the most reliable tree of life for birds to date.
The project strengthens the theory of a "big bang" for bird evolution during the 10 to 15 million years that followed the dinosaurs' extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. It also suggests that the earliest common ancestor of land birds, which include parrots and songbirds as well as hawks and eagles, was an apex predator.
The study reveals remarkable results on the evolution of birds from a new well resolved phylogenetic tree based on complete genomes of data, to the key role of genome evolution of birds, for example describing how vocal learning may have evolved in order Separate groups in some birds and speech regions of the human brain, such as the sex chromosomes of birds evolved; as the birds lost their teeth; as the singing behavior regulates genes in the brain; among others.
Agostinho Antunes led the Portuguese team of nine CIIMAR researchers (Rui Borges, João Paulo Machado, Imran Khan, Daniela Almeida, Emanuel Maldonado, Joana Pereira, Kartik Sunagar, e Siby Philip), masters and doctoral students. The research carried out at CIIMAR focused in particular on the study of certain families of genes that can explain, for example, how birds evolved to have a lighter skeleton, color vision, color patterns of the feathers, diversification of smell, taste, development, detoxification, immunity and disease resistance, reproduction, etc.
This massive comparative genomics project, which needed several supercomputers to process all its data, took more than four years and involved hundreds of scientists from about 80 institutions in 20 different countries. The research was led by Guojie Zhang from BGI in Shenzhen, China, and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; Erich Jarvis from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; and Thomas Gilbert from the Natural History Museum of Denmark and Curtin University in Australia and involved more than 200 scientists from 80 institutions in 20 countries.
The first results of Avian phylogenomics Consortium were broadcast almost simultaneously in 23 articles - eight articles were published in a special issue of the prestigious Science journal, and the remaining 15 articles will be published in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other magazines.
(disponível em: ciimar.up.pt)
