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Record W4407838679 · doi:10.1093/ismejo/wraf031

Phylogenomic resolution of marine to freshwater dinoflagellate transitions

2025· article· en· W4407838679 on OpenAlexafffund
Mahara Mtawali, Elizabeth C. Cooney, Jayd Adams, Corey C. Holt, Patrick J. Keeling

Bibliographic record

VenueThe ISME Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicProtist diversity and phylogeny
Canadian institutionsTula FoundationUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaGordon and Betty Moore Foundation
KeywordsBiologyDinoflagellatePhylogenomicsEcologyProtistPhototrophPlastidPhylogeneticsEcological nicheRange (aeronautics)Tree of life (biology)Evolutionary biologyGeneBotanyHabitatChloroplastPhotosynthesisCladeGenetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dinoflagellates are an abundant and diverse group of protists that inhabit aquatic environments worldwide. They are characterized by numerous unique cellular and molecular traits, and have adapted to an unusually broad range of life strategies, including phototrophy, heterotrophy, parasitism, and all combinations of these. For most microbial groups, transitions from marine to freshwater environments are relatively rare, as changes in salinity are thought to lead to significant osmotic challenges that are difficult for the cell to overcome. Recent work has shown that dinoflagellates have overcome these challenges relatively often in evolutionary time, but because this is mostly based on single gene trees with low overall support, many of the relationships between freshwater and marine groups remain unresolved. Normally, phylogenomics could clarify such conclusions, but despite the recent surge in data, virtually no freshwater dinoflagellates have been characterized at the genome-wide level. Here, we generated 30 transcriptomes from cultures and single cells collected from freshwater environments to infer a robustly supported phylogenomic tree from 217 conserved genes, resolving at least seven transitions to freshwater in dinoflagellates. Mapping the distribution of ASVs from freshwater environmental samples onto this tree confirms these groups and identifies additional lineages where freshwater dinoflagellates likely remain unsampled. We also sampled two species of Durinskia, a genus of "dinotoms" with both marine and freshwater lineages containing Nitzschia-derived tertiary plastids. Ribosomal RNA phylogenies show that the host cells are closely related, but their endosymbionts are likely descended from two distantly-related freshwater Nitzschia species that were acquired in parallel and relatively recently.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.001
Threshold uncertainty score0.002

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.225
Teacher spread0.218 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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