PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Hajk-Georg Drost
AU  - Alexander Gabel
AU  - Tomislav Domazet-Lošo
AU  - Marcel Quint
AU  - Ivo Grosse
TI  - Capturing Evolutionary Signatures in Transcriptomes with myTAI
AID  - 10.1101/051565
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 051565
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/03/051565.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/03/051565.full
AB  - Combining transcriptome data of biological processes or response to stimuli with evolutionary information such as the phylogenetic conservation of genes or their sequence divergence rates enables the investigation of evolutionary constraints on these processes or responses. Such phylotranscriptomic analyses recently unraveled that mid-developmental transcriptomes of fly, fish, and cress were dominated by evolutionarily conserved genes and genes under negative selection and thus recapitulated the developmental hourglass on the transcriptomic level. Here, we present a protocol for performing phylotranscriptomic analyses on any biological process of interest. When applying this protocol, users are capable of detecting different evolutionary constraints acting on different stages of the biological process of interest in any species. For each step of the protocol, modular and easy-to-use open-source software tools are provided, which enable a broad range of scientists to apply phylotranscriptomic analyses to a wide spectrum of biological questions.