Figure 3.

(A) Ciliate genomes harbor fewer, but larger gene families than other eukaryotes. This trend holds true across most ciliate taxa (B, red ellipse), including parasitic ciliates (e.g., Ichthyophthirius multifilis and Pseudocohnilembus persalinus), which possess a substantially reduced proteome. (B) The ciliates with scrambled germ‐line genomes (black arrows, Stylonychia lemnae and Oxytricha trifallax; lower left and upper right, respectively), possess comparable paralog diversity in ancient gene families to ciliates lacking genome scrambling, despite evidence for scrambling‐associated gene family expansion. These gene families are more likely to be lineage‐specific or are too divergent for gene family binning and as such do not show up on this plot.