Author Correction: A genomics approach reveals insights into the importance of gene losses for mammalian adaptations.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Phenotype loss is associated with widespread divergence of the gene regulatory landscape in evolution.

Detecting the genomic changes underlying phenotypic changes between species is a main goal of evolutionary biology and genomics. Evolutionary theory predicts that changes in cis-regulatory elements are important for morphological changes. We combined genome sequencing, functional genomics and genome-wide comparative analyses to investigate regulatory elements in lineages that lost morphological traits.

A genomics approach reveals insights into the importance of gene losses for mammalian adaptations.

Identifying the genomic changes that underlie phenotypic adaptations is a key challenge in evolutionary biology and genomics. Loss of protein-coding genes is one type of genomic change with the potential to affect phenotypic evolution. Here, we develop a genomics approach to accurately detect gene losses and investigate their importance for adaptive evolution in mammals.

chainCleaner improves genome alignment specificity and sensitivity.

Motivation: Accurate alignments between entire genomes are crucial for comparative genomics. However, computing sensitive and accurate genome alignments is a challenging problem, complicated by genomic rearrangements.

Results: Here we present a fast approach, called chainCleaner, that improves the specificity in genome alignments by accurately detecting and removing local alignments that obscure the evolutionary history of genomic rearrangements.