Ancestral gene content estimates under gain–loss–duplication depend on the chosen observation threshold
Gergely J. Szöllősi, Tom A. Williams · 2026
Read Ancestral gene content estimates under gain–loss–duplication depend on the chosen observation threshold by Gergely J. Szöllősi, Tom A. Williams (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13438450.txt.
Description
Gergely Szöllősi and Tom Williams show that a headline number in evolution, the gene content of the last archaeal common ancestor, swings widely with a quiet technical choice. A recent method rebuilds ancestral counts from how many copies each living genome carries. The published work kept only families with at least four copies overall. Their 2026 study reimplemented the method in fast code and ran it on all 269 archaeal genomes.
Sweeping the size cutoff from one to ten moved the ancestor's inferred family count from 3,847 down to 1,506, a two-and-a-half-fold range with no natural stopping point. At every setting the ancestor still came out larger than a typical living genome. The moral flips with the dial: one setting paints an ancestor that mostly shed genes, another a modest one that grew and shrank by turns. They ask that threshold effects be reported openly.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gergely J. Szöllősi, Tom A. Williams |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 4 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |