EASYstrata: an all-in-one workflow for genome annotation and genomic divergence analysis

New reference genomes and transcriptomes are increasingly available across the tree of life, opening new avenues to tackle exciting questions. However, there are still challenges associated with annotating genomes and inferring evolutionary processes and with a lack of methodological standardisation. Here, we propose a new workflow designed for evolutionary analyses to overcome these challenges, facilitating the detection of recombination suppression and its consequences in terms of rearrangements and transposable element accumulation. To do so, we assemble multiple bioinformatic steps in a single easy-to-use workflow. We combine state-of-the-art tools to detect transposable elements, annotate genomes, infer gene orthology relationships, compute divergence between sequences, infer evolutionary strata (i.e. footprints of stepwise extension of recombination suppression) and their structural rearrangements, and visualise the results. This workflow, called EASYstrata, was applied to reannotate 42 published genomes from Microbotryum fungi. We show in further case examples from a plant and an animal that we recover the same strata as previously described. While this tool was developed with the goal to infer divergence between sex or mating-type chromosomes, it can be applied to any pair of haplotypes whose pattern of divergence is of interest. This workflow will facilitate the study of non-model species for which newly sequenced phased diploid genomes are becoming available.