Driven progressive evolution of genome sequence complexity in Cyanobacteria Moya, Andrés Hervas Oliver, José Luis Gómez Martín, Cristina Lebrón Aguilar, Ricardo Román Roldán, Ramón Progressive evolution, or the tendency towards increasing complexity, is a controversial issue in biology, which resolution entails a proper measurement of complexity. Genomes are the best entities to address this challenge, as they encode the historical information of a species’ biotic and environmental interactions. As a case study, we have measured genome sequence complexity in the ancient phylum Cyanobacteria. To arrive at an appropriate measure of genome sequence complexity, we have chosen metrics that do not decipher biological functionality but that show strong phylogenetic signal. Using a ridge regression of those metrics against root-to-tip distance, we detected positive trends towards higher complexity in three of them. Lastly, we applied three standard tests to detect if progressive evolution is passive or driven—the minimum, ancestor– descendant, and sub-clade tests. These results provide evidence for driven progressive evolution at the genome-level in the phylum Cyanobacteria. 2021-02-11T13:12:27Z 2021-02-11T13:12:27Z 2020 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Moya, A., Oliver, J.L., Verdú, M. et al. Driven progressive evolution of genome sequence complexity in Cyanobacteria. Sci Rep 10, 19073 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76014-4 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/66474 10.1038/s41598-020-76014-4 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España NATURE RESEARCH