Krystalynne Morris

TL;DR: The use of complete-genome sequencing in the characterization of spontaneously arising mutations in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae yields numerous unexpected findings, in particular a very high rate of point mutation and skewed distribution of base-substitution types in the mitochondrion and segmental duplication and deletion in the nuclear genome.

TL;DR: A direct and unbiased estimate of the nuclear mutation rate and its molecular spectrum is provided with a set of C. elegans mutation-accumulation lines that reveal a mutation rate about tenfold higher than previous indirect estimates and an excess of insertions over deletions.

TL;DR: A wide-scale screen for mutations in the mitochondrial genome revealed a mutation rate that is two orders of magnitude higher than previous indirect estimates, a highly biased mutational spectrum, multiple mutations affecting coding function, as well as mutational hotspots at homopolymeric nucleotide stretches.

TL;DR: This work directly compared observed transcriptional variation patterns in the mutation-accumulation and natural isolate lines to a neutral model of transcriptome evolution to show that strong stabilizing selection dominates the evolution of transcriptional change for thousands of C. elegans expressed sequences.

TL;DR: Overall, results support the suitability of massively parallel sequencing for identification of nematodes and the frequency of reads representing individual species did not correlate with the number of individuals in the metagenomic samples, suggesting that further methodological work is necessary before it will be justified for inferring the relative abundances of species within a nematode community.