Marcet Houben, MarinaGabaldón Estevan, Juan Antonio, 1973-2015-11-182015-11-182015Marcet-Houben M, Gabaldón T. Beyond the whole-genome duplication: phylogenetic evidence for an ancient interspecies hybridization in the Baker's yeast lineage. PLoS biology. 2015;13(8):e1002220. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.10022201544-9173http://hdl.handle.net/10230/25143Whole-genome duplications have shaped the genomes of several vertebrate, plant, and fungal lineages. Earlier studies have focused on establishing when these events occurred and on elucidating their functional and evolutionary consequences, but we still lack sufficient understanding of how genome duplications first originated. We used phylogenomics to study the ancient genome duplication occurred in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae lineage and found compelling evidence for the existence of a contemporaneous interspecies hybridization. We propose that the genome doubling was a direct consequence of this hybridization and that it served to provide stability to the recently formed allopolyploid. This scenario provides a mechanism for the origin of this ancient duplication and the lineage that originated from it and brings a new perspective to the interpretation of the origin and consequences of whole-genome duplications.application/pdfeng© 2015 Marcet-Houben, Gabaldón. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Saccharomyces cerevisiae -- MetabolismeGenomesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002220info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess