Phenotype shift scores reveal the scale and phylogenetic structure of phenotypic differentiation in primates.
- 1University of California Santa Cruz
Abstract
Continuous traits evolve unevenly across phylogenies, producing patterns of phenotypic differentiation shaped by both shared ancestry and lineage-specific change. Identifying exceptionally differentiated species pairs may therefore improve genome-phenome comparisons, but existing approaches rarely rank such contrasts across entire trees. Here we introduce the Phenotype Shift Score (PSS), a phylogenetic comparative framework integrating model-based trait divergence, observed trait range and patristic distance. Applying PSS to 153 continuous primate traits reveals trait-specific distributions of extreme differentiation across evolutionary depth. Body and brain mass show deeper-than-expected extremes under fitted Brownian motion or Ornstein-Uhlenbeck nulls, whereas body-size-adjusted brain mass localizes recent differentiation within cercopithecid lineages, complementing published branchwise reconstructions. PSS-informed groups produce more selective and more strongly enriched comparative-genomic signals than groups based on absolute phenotypic extremes. PSS is implemented in the open-source R package phyloPSS, with pairwise results available through the Primate Genome-Phenome Archive.
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BibTeX
@misc{barteri2026phenotype,
title = {{Phenotype shift scores reveal the scale and phylogenetic structure of phenotypic differentiation in primates.}},
author = {F. Barteri and A. Navarro and O. E. Cornejo},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.03.749256},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.03.749256v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Phenotype shift scores reveal the scale and phylogenetic structure of phenotypic differentiation in primates.
AU - F. Barteri
AU - A. Navarro
AU - O. E. Cornejo
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.03.749256
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.03.749256v1
AB - Continuous traits evolve unevenly across phylogenies, producing patterns of phenotypic differentiation shaped by both shared ancestry and lineage-specific change. Identifying exceptionally differentiated species pairs may therefore improve genome-phenome comparisons, but existing approaches rarely rank such contrasts across entire trees. Here we introduce the Phenotype Shift Score (PSS), a phylogenetic comparative framework integrating model-based trait divergence, observed trait range and patristic distance. Applying PSS to 153 continuous primate traits reveals trait-specific distributions of extreme differentiation across evolutionary depth. Body and brain mass show deeper-than-expected extremes under fitted Brownian motion or Ornstein-Uhlenbeck nulls, whereas body-size-adjusted brain mass localizes recent differentiation within cercopithecid lineages, complementing published branchwise reconstructions. PSS-informed groups produce more selective and more strongly enriched comparative-genomic signals than groups based on absolute phenotypic extremes. PSS is implemented in the open-source R package phyloPSS, with pairwise results available through the Primate Genome-Phenome Archive.
ER -