Silvia Prieto

Silvia Prieto

@silviaprietob.bsky.social

🔎 Bioinformatics, Comparative/ Biodiversity/ Conservation Genomics & Marine Bio 👩‍💻 PhD student @DessimozLab @unil_qb 👩‍🎓 MSci @UoABioSci

166 Followers 281 Following 9 Posts Joined Mar 2025
1 month ago
AmpliPhy improves gene trees by adding homologs without affecting alignments In phylogenomics, gene tree reconstruction depends on multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and tree inference, and ongoing work continues to improve inference quality. Denser taxon sampling has been associated with improved gene tree inference, suggesting that adding homologs could be a practical route to higher accuracy as sequence databases continue to expand. However, adding sequences can influence multiple steps of typical inference pipelines, and little is known on its specific effect on the multiple sequence alignment, tree reconstruction, and rooting steps. We performed a large-scale empirical benchmark to quantify how homolog enrichment affects alignment and phylogenetic inference. Using an enrichment-impoverishment design and a measure of tree accuracy based on taxonomic congruence, we found that enrichment consistently improves tree inference quality, while effects on alignment quality are marginal. We show that this improvement is associated with accurate root placement on enriched trees when sensitive homolog search is accompanied. Notably, much of the benefit can be retained with relatively compact alignments produced by sequence addition. Building on these observations, we provide a tool, AmpliPhy, which efficiently improves phylogenetic reconstruction of protein families through homolog enrichment. The AmpliPhy open-source pipeline software is available at https://github.com/DessimozLab/ampliphy. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Swiss National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/00yjd3n13, 216623, 10005715

Can ever-increasing sequence databases improve phylogenetic reconstruction of a gene family? Our new preprint introduces AmpliPhy, a pipeline that automates homolog enrichment to improve gene tree inference, built on a robust phylogenomic benchmark scheme. 🧵1/n
📃 doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.26.701724

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4 months ago
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Gene annotations matter for downstream analyses: different structural gene-annotation pipelines yield markedly different orthology calls. We compare four strategies across species and argue for standards & QC before inference. Work led by @silviaprietob.bsky.social. Paper: doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

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4 months ago

Happy to see my illustration featured on the cover!

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4 months ago

Our lab has published a couple of major papers in the past few months, which I would like to highlight in this thread! 🧵

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6 months ago
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Here are all the talks I attended and sketched at #ESEB2025 ! Only a fraction of the 642 speakers at the conference 😮

I had an absolutely amazing week chatting about lots of fascinating science

#sciart #eseb #esebcongress @eseb2025.bsky.social

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6 months ago
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You can find my poster "Microsynteny and functional relatedness in eukaryotes" at the slot 209 today and visit at around 5 if you want to know more or talk anything synteny, gene order, functional association or genome evolution related :) #ESEB2025

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6 months ago
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@irenejulca.bsky.social presenting the results unveiling the functional fate of duplicates genes at #ESEB2025 !

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6 months ago
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It's been an exciting first day of #ESEB2025, with a great opening talk by Michael Lynch. Moreover, a very timely recap on lessons learnt in pines climate change adaptations by Santiago González, during a week marked by unprecedented wildfires in Spain. [Among many, many other interesting talks]

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7 months ago
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Incendios submarinos: las olas de calor son un infierno para los corales mediterráneos Cantaba Mecano en los años 90 que «Hawaii y Bombay son dos paraísos». Lo que no podía imaginar Ana Torroja en aquel entonces es que, en el contexto actual de crisis climática, hasta el paraíso pued…

¿Has oído alguna vez hablar de los #incendios submarinos?🔥🌊

Hoy, @danigomezgras.bsky.social de
@medrecover.bsky.social nos explica las consecuencias ecológicas y el impacto de este fenómeno, cada vez más intenso y frecuente, en los corales mediterráneos 🌡️

ecomandanga.wordpress.com/2025/07/23/i...

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8 months ago

Another consequence of the disastrous attack on NIH by Trump, Musk, and their followers

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8 months ago

This work is partly limited by a poorly resolved phylogeny and so future work will look to revisit these results with an improved phylogenetic framework. Nonetheless, we hope our extensive literature synthesis and results will facilitate further work in this under-studied molluscan clade 🌈🐌.

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8 months ago

Surprisingly, we found no evidence that diet choice, chemical acquisition and colour pattern evolved together.

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8 months ago

What was the dorid ancestor like? Likely a sponge-eater 🧽 sequestering its metabolites, with a flair for fashion: showing complex colour patterns with spots or stripes ✨👗👔. This trend remains common in modern dorids (figs 1 & 3).

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8 months ago

We compiled data on prey preference 🍔, chemical acquisition method 🧪 and colour pattern 🎨 across 88 dorid genera.

Using published sequence data, we reconstructed a phylogeny of the Doridoidei to investigate the evolution of these traits in tandem.

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8 months ago
Image corresponding to Figure 1 in the manuscript. The colour patterns diversity in dorid nudibranchs is displayed by 25 images of different dorid species.

Nudibranchs are known for housing diverse chemical compounds and for their eye-catching colour patterns. These features are key in predator deterrence and signaling.

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8 months ago
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Tracing the evolution of key traits in dorid nudibranchs Reconstructing trait evolution is critically important for elucidating the processes generating biodiversity. However, this work is in its infancy in non-model clades for which we lack a basic underst...

Check out our recent paper “Tracing the evolution of key traits in dorid nudibranchs”! 🧬🐌 dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Nudibranchs are a fascinating and diverse group of molluscs, unique and interesting systems in ecology and evolutionary biology.
@molluscular.bsky.social

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9 months ago
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Unicore is now published on GBE 🚀
Unicore rapidly identifies structural single-copy core genes from input species proteomes for phylogenetic analysis. Powered by Foldseek and ProstT5, Unicore enables linear-scale structure-based phylogeny of any given set of taxa. 🧵1/n
📃 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaf109

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11 months ago
Computational Biology Symposium

After 6 (healthy) months of hiatus from social media, first post with a brand new conference announcement!! 🔥COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY IS EVERYWHERE! Join us in Lausanne for the first international Computational Biology Symposium! 18-19 September 2025 Registrations are OPEN! cbiosymposium.unil.ch

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