Dear Barcelona Evo-Deviants, Toni Gabaldon will be hosting Michel Milinkovitch next week at the CRG. His seminar will be on reptilian phylogenomics and evo-devo (see below). Best, Yogi --- seminar announcement: ---- Wednesday, June 12th, 15:00 h Sala Charles Darwin (PRBB) Reptilian-transcriptomes.org: from phylogenomics to EvoDevo. Michel C. Milinkovitch Laboratory of Artificial & Natural Evolution (LANE) Dept of Genetics & Evolution, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Reptiles are largely under-represented in comparative genomics/transcriptomics despite the fact that they are substantially more diverse in many respects than mammals. We performed deep-sequencing of transcriptomes of divergent reptilian and avian lineages and used in-house software pipelines for recursive similarity searches and homology assignment. Our approach identifies the majority of the reference chicken transcripts and about 50% of de-novo assembled reptilian transcripts. We also identify dozens of thousands microsatellite, SNP, and indel polymorphisms for population genetic and linkage analyses. We build very large multiple alignments (hundreds of thousands residues per species) and generate the first robust large-scale phylogenomic hypothesis for Sauropsida and mammals. Our analyses indicate that turtles are not basal living reptiles but are rather associated with Archosaurians, hence, answering a long-standing question in the phylogeny of Amniotes. We also deep-sequenced in snakes the transcriptome of the vomeronasal organ (VNO), an olfactory structure that detects pheromones and environmental cues. Snakes exhibit a very large VNO associated with a sophisticated tongue delivery system. The predominant V1R and V2R transmembrane chemoreceptor repertoires in tetrapods are believed to detect airborne and water-soluble molecules, respectively. It has been suggested that the shift in habitat of early tetrapods from water to land is reflected by an increase in the ratio of V1R/V2R genes. Our analyses indicate that snakes and lizards retain an extremely limited number of V1R genes but exhibit a large number of V2R genes, including multiple lineages of reptile-specific and snake-specific expansions. These results do not support the hypothesis that the shift to a vomeronasal receptor repertoire dominated by V1Rs in mammals reflects the evolutionary transition of early tetrapods from water to land. Instead, our study reveals how mammals and squamates differentially adapted the same ancestral vomeronasal repertoire to succeed in a terrestrial environment. The reptilian transcriptomes (freely available at http://www.reptilian-transcriptomes.org) should prove useful new resourcea as reptiles are becoming important new models for comparative genomics, ecology, and evolutionary developmental genetics.