Kevin M. Kocot

TL;DR: The draft genome of Pleurobrachia bachei, Pacific sea gooseberry, together with ten other ctenophore transcriptomes, are presented, and show that they are remarkably distinct from other animal genomes in their content of neurogenic, immune and developmental genes.

TL;DR: This work uses transcriptome and genome data from all major lineages (except Monoplacophora) and recovers a well-supported topology for Mollusca to propose the node-based name Pleistomolluscan, which strongly support the Aculifera hypothesis and finds support for advanced cephalization and shells as possibly having multiple origins within Mollsusca.

TL;DR: Investigating possible causes of systematic error by expanding taxon sampling with eight novel transcriptomes, strictly enforcing orthology inference criteria, and progressively examining potential causes of systemic error while using both maximum-likelihood with robust data partitioning and Bayesian inference with a site-heterogeneous model finds a single, statistically robust placement of ctenophores as the authors' most distant animal relatives.

TL;DR: Contrary to long held beliefs that the orb web is the crowning achievement of spider evolution, ancestral state reconstructions of web type support a phylogenetically ancient origin of the orbweb, and diversification analyses show that the mostly ground-dwelling, web-less RTA clade diversified faster than orb weavers.

TL;DR: The first attempt to investigate animal relationships using genome-scale data from all phyla is presented, and matrix construction with an eye towards testing specific relationships is explored, showing that Lophotrochozoa can be constructed in strongly conflicting ways using different taxon- and/or orthologue sets.