Specimen collection is essential for modern science.

Natural history museums are vital repositories of specimens, samples and data that inform about the natural world; this Formal Comment revisits a Perspective that advocated for the adoption of compassionate collection practices, querying whether it will ever be possible to completely do away with whole animal specimen collection.

Homoplastic microinversions and the avian tree of life.

BACKGROUND: Microinversions are cytologically undetectable inversions of DNA sequences that accumulate slowly in genomes. Like many other rare genomic changes (RGCs), microinversions are thought to be virtually homoplasy-free evolutionary characters, suggesting that they may be very useful for difficult phylogenetic problems such as the avian tree of life. However, few detailed surveys of these genomic rearrangements have been conducted, making it difficult to assess this hypothesis or understand the impact of microinversions upon genome evolution. RESULTS: We surveyed non-coding sequence data from a recent avian phylogenetic study and found substantially more microinversions than expected based upon prior information about vertebrate inversion rates, although this is likely due to underestimation of these rates in previous studies. Most microinversions were lineage-specific or united well-accepted groups. However, some homoplastic microinversions were evident among the informative characters. Hemiplasy, which reflects differences between gene trees and the species tree, did not explain the observed homoplasy. Two specific loci were microinversion hotspots, with high numbers of inversions that included both the homoplastic as well as some overlapping microinversions. Neither stem-loop structures nor detectable sequence motifs were associated with microinversions in the hotspots. CONCLUSIONS: Microinversions can provide valuable phylogenetic information, although power analysis indicates that large amounts of sequence data will be necessary to identify enough inversions (and similar RGCs) to resolve short branches in the tree of life. Moreover, microinversions are not perfect characters and should be interpreted with caution, just as with any other character type. Independent of their use for phylogenetic analyses, microinversions are important because they have the potential to complicate alignment of non-coding sequences. Despite their low rate of accumulation, they have clearly contributed to genome evolution, suggesting that active identification of microinversions will prove useful in future phylogenomic studies.

Phylogenomics of white-eyes, a 'great speciator', reveals Indonesian archipelago as the center of lineage diversity.

Archipelagoes serve as important 'natural laboratories' which facilitate the study of island radiations and contribute to the understanding of evolutionary processes. The white-eye genus Zosterops is a classical example of a 'great speciator', comprising c. 100 species from across the Old World, most of them insular. We achieved an extensive geographic DNA sampling of Zosterops by using historical specimens and recently collected samples. Using over 700 genome-wide loci in conjunction with coalescent species tree methods and gene flow detection approaches, we untangled the reticulated evolutionary history of Zosterops, which comprises three main clades centered in Indo-Africa, Asia, and Australasia, respectively. Genetic introgression between species permeates the Zosterops phylogeny, regardless of how distantly related species are. Crucially, we identified the Indonesian archipelago, and specifically Borneo, as the major center of diversity and the only area where all three main clades overlap, attesting to the evolutionary importance of this region.