Description

This track shows multiple alignments of plant species and measurements of evolutionary conservation using two methods (phastCons and phyloP) from the PHAST package, for all species. The multiple alignments were generated using multiz and other tools in the UCSC/Penn State Bioinformatics comparative genomics alignment pipeline. Conserved elements identified by phastCons are also displayed in this track.

PhastCons is a hidden Markov model-based method that estimates the probability that each nucleotide belongs to a conserved element, based on the multiple alignment. It considers not just each individual alignment column, but also its flanking columns. By contrast, phyloP separately measures conservation at individual columns, ignoring the effects of their neighbors. As a consequence, the phyloP plots have a less smooth appearance than the phastCons plots, with more "texture" at individual sites. The two methods have different strengths and weaknesses. PhastCons is sensitive to "runs" of conserved sites, and is therefore effective for picking out conserved elements. PhyloP, on the other hand, is more appropriate for evaluating signatures of selection at particular nucleotides or classes of nucleotides (e.g., third codon positions, or first positions of miRNA target sites).

Another important difference is that phyloP can measure acceleration (faster evolution than expected under neutral drift) as well as conservation (slower than expected evolution). In the phyloP plots, sites predicted to be conserved are assigned positive scores (and shown in blue), while sites predicted to be fast-evolving are assigned negative scores (and shown in red). The absolute values of the scores represent -log p-values under a null hypothesis of neutral evolution. The phastCons scores, by contrast, represent probabilities of negative selection and range between 0 and 1.

Both phastCons and phyloP treat alignment gaps and unaligned nucleotides as missing data.

Methods

This pipeline was revised based on the Conservation Track in UCSC genome browser wiki.

Pairwise alignments with the reference genome were generated for each species using lastz from repeat-masked genomic sequence. Pairwise alignments were then linked into chains using a dynamic programming algorithm that finds maximally scoring chains of gapless subsections of the alignments organized in a kd-tree. High-scoring chains were then placed along the genome, with gaps filled by lower-scoring chains, to produce an alignment net. The resulting best-in-genome pairwise alignments were progressively aligned using multiz to produce multiple alignments.

Phylogenetic Tree Model

PhastCons is one of phylogenetic methods that rely on a tree model containing the tree topology, branch lengths representing evolutionary distance at neutrally evolving sites, the background distribution of nucleotides, and a substitution rate matrix. The all-species tree model for this track was generated using the phyloFit program from the PHAST package (REV model, EM algorithm, medium precision) using multiple alignments of 4-fold degenerate sites. The 4d sites were derived from corresponding gene set.

PhastCons Conservation

The phastCons program computes conservation scores based on a phylo-HMM, a type of probabilistic model that describes both the process of DNA substitution at each site in a genome and the way this process changes from one site to the next (Felsenstein and Churchill 1996, Yang 1995, Siepel and Haussler 2005). PhastCons uses a two-state phylo-HMM, with a state for conserved regions and a state for non-conserved regions. The value plotted at each site is the posterior probability that the corresponding alignment column was "generated" by the conserved state of the phylo-HMM. These scores reflect the phylogeny (including branch lengths) of the species in question, a continuous-time Markov model of the nucleotide substitution process, and a tendency for conservation levels to be autocorrelated along the genome (i.e., to be similar at adjacent sites). The general reversible (REV) substitution model was used. Unlike many conservation-scoring programs, phastCons does not rely on a sliding window of fixed size; therefore, short highly-conserved regions and long moderately conserved regions can both obtain high scores. More information about phastCons can be found in Siepel et al. 2005.

The phastCons parameters used with --viterbi option.

Conserved Elements

The conserved elements were predicted by running phastCons with the --viterbi option. The predicted elements are segments of the alignment that are likely to have been "generated" by the conserved state of the phylo-HMM. Each element is assigned a log-odds score equal to its log probability under the conserved model minus its log probability under the non-conserved model. The "score" field associated with this track contains transformed log-odds scores, taking values between 0 and 1000. (The scores are transformed using a monotonic function of the form a * log(x) + b.) The raw log odds scores are retained in the "name" field and can be seen on the details page or in the browser when the track's display mode is set to "pack" or "full".

Credits

This track was created using the following programs:

• Alignment tools: lastz (formerly blastz) and multiz by Minmei Hou, Scott Schwartz and Webb Miller of the Penn State Bioinformatics Group
• Chaining and Netting: axtChain, chainNet by Jim Kent at UCSC
• Conservation scoring: phastCons, phyloP, phyloFit, tree_doctor, msa_view and other programs in PHAST by Adam Siepel at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (original development done at the Haussler lab at UCSC).

References

Phylo-HMMs, phastCons, and phyloP:

Felsenstein J, Churchill GA. A Hidden Markov Model approach to variation among sites in rate of evolution. Mol Biol Evol. 1996 Jan;13(1):93-104. PMID: 8583911

Pollard KS, Hubisz MJ, Rosenbloom KR, Siepel A. Detection of nonneutral substitution rates on mammalian phylogenies. Genome Res. 2010 Jan;20(1):110-21. PMID: 19858363; PMC: PMC2798823

Siepel A, Bejerano G, Pedersen JS, Hinrichs AS, Hou M, Rosenbloom K, Clawson H, Spieth J, Hillier LW, Richards S, et al. Evolutionarily conserved elements in vertebrate, insect, worm, and yeast genomes. Genome Res. 2005 Aug;15(8):1034-50. PMID: 16024819; PMC: PMC1182216

Siepel A, Haussler D. Phylogenetic Hidden Markov Models. In: Nielsen R, editor. Statistical Methods in Molecular Evolution. New York: Springer; 2005. pp. 325-351.

Yang Z. A space-time process model for the evolution of DNA sequences. Genetics. 1995 Feb;139(2):993-1005. PMID: 7713447; PMC: PMC1206396

Chain/Net:

Kent WJ, Baertsch R, Hinrichs A, Miller W, Haussler D. Evolution's cauldron: duplication, deletion, and rearrangement in the mouse and human genomes. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Sep 30;100(20):11484-9. PMID: 14500911; PMC: PMC208784

Multiz:

Blanchette M, Kent WJ, Riemer C, Elnitski L, Smit AF, Roskin KM, Baertsch R, Rosenbloom K, Clawson H, Green ED, et al. Aligning multiple genomic sequences with the threaded blockset aligner. Genome Res. 2004 Apr;14(4):708-15. PMID: 15060014; PMC: PMC383317

Lastz (formerly Blastz):

Chiaromonte F, Yap VB, Miller W. Scoring pairwise genomic sequence alignments. Pac Symp Biocomput. 2002:115-26. PMID: 11928468

Harris RS. Improved pairwise alignment of genomic DNA. Ph.D. Thesis. Pennsylvania State University, USA. 2007.

Schwartz S, Kent WJ, Smit A, Zhang Z, Baertsch R, Hardison RC, Haussler D, Miller W. Human-mouse alignments with BLASTZ. Genome Res. 2003 Jan;13(1):103-7. PMID: 12529312; PMC: PMC430961