An automated pipeline for reconstructing whole genome duplications

Whole genome duplications leave lasting traces in our genomes. How these present in terms of gene content and order varies over time. While collinear blocks of paralogs, long stretches of conserved gene order and content termed ‘microsynteny’, are a distinctive feature of comparatively recent WGD and have been integral in reconstructing the history of ancestral duplication events, this signal degrades over time, making analysis of older events non-trivial. While gene order degrades quickly, gene content is often better conserved and recent work takes advantage of this to reconstruct older events and ancestral pre-WGD and post-WGD chromosomes. However, these new methods are complicated and not well-documented. Here we develop an automated and user-friendly pipeline for reconstructing ancestral chromosomes before and after WGD, and use the conservation of gene content to infer chromosomal rearrangement events in this timeframe. We verify the efficacy of our tool by reconstructing the ancestral acipenseriform, a model system for vertebrate WGD and rediploidisation. Our pipeline should serve to make ancestral reconstruction more accessible and provide a solid foundation for future analysis.