#24 · Genomics

Kinship-corrected pan-GWAS ties rare genome expansion in Aspergillus to pathogenicity

The common thread is comparative genome architecture set against phenotype. The four-species Aspergillus pan-GWAS applies kinship correction and associates pathogenicity with rare genome expansion and domestication with rare genome contraction, and it is the item that performs an explicit kinship-corrected association test. The Heterosigma akashiwo entry provides chromosome-scale assemblies and annotations for Japanese and French strains with synteny comparison, but reports no pathogenicity contrast, so it contributes resource-level architecture rather than association. The Indonesian rice study supplies HiFi consensus genomes for seven cultivars, with orthogroup analysis and QC-filtered promoter comparisons of trait candidates. What is new is the population-level test, kinship-corrected pan-GWAS linking rare genome expansion and contraction to phenotype, set alongside high-quality assemblies from other systems.