Computational estimation of genome size and its evolution in relation to body size in the fast adaptive radiation of African cichlids

The size of the genome is a highly variable trait in eukaryotes that shows remarkably different values even between closely-related species. The origin of this variation is complex but, among other things, related with the activity of families of transposable elements present in the genome. We are studying the evolution of this trait within the group of African cichlids that inhabits lakes Kivu, Edward and Albert (KEA region), to examine how genome size can vary in the framework of a fast adaptive radiation. Through an especially designed pipeline that combines different bioinformatics tools, we estimated the genome size of these species using a k-mer approach, which uses only raw Illumina reads of the genome and consumes less time and resource than genome assembly methods. With these estimations we are tracking the evolution of the trait on a new phylogeny based on our data, to understand how and where genome size changed within our group, with a particular attention to variation between close-related species and to the relation between this trait and body size.