scholarly journals Phylogenomic Reconstruction Sheds Light on New Relationships and Timescale of Rails (Aves: Rallidae) Evolution

Diversity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan C. Garcia-R ◽  
Emily Moriarty Lemmon ◽  
Alan R. Lemmon ◽  
Nigel French

The integration of state-of-the-art molecular techniques and analyses, together with a broad taxonomic sampling, can provide new insights into bird interrelationships and divergence. Despite their evolutionary significance, the relationships among several rail lineages remain unresolved as does the general timescale of rail evolution. Here, we disentangle the deep phylogenetic structure of rails using anchored phylogenomics. We analysed a set of 393 loci from 63 species, representing approximately 40% of the extant familial diversity. Our phylogenomic analyses reconstruct the phylogeny of rails and robustly infer several previously contentious relationships. Concatenated maximum likelihood and coalescent species-tree approaches recover identical topologies with strong node support. The results are concordant with previous phylogenetic studies using small DNA datasets, but they also supply an additional resolution. Our dating analysis provides contrasting divergence times using fossils and Bayesian and non-Bayesian approaches. Our study refines the evolutionary history of rails, offering a foundation for future evolutionary studies of birds.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven D. Schrinner ◽  
Rebecca Serra Mari ◽  
Jana Ebler ◽  
Mikko Rautiainen ◽  
Lancelot Seillier ◽  
...  

Abstract Resolving genomes at haplotype level is crucial for understanding the evolutionary history of polyploid species and for designing advanced breeding strategies. Polyploid phasing still presents considerable challenges, especially in regions of collapsing haplotypes.We present WhatsHap polyphase, a novel two-stage approach that addresses these challenges by (i) clustering reads and (ii) threading the haplotypes through the clusters. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of phasing quality. Using a real tetraploid potato dataset, we demonstrate how to assemble local genomic regions of interest at the haplotype level. Our algorithm is implemented as part of the widely used open source tool WhatsHap.


2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1736) ◽  
pp. 2246-2254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabien Burki ◽  
Noriko Okamoto ◽  
Jean-François Pombert ◽  
Patrick J. Keeling

An important missing piece in the puzzle of how plastids spread across the eukaryotic tree of life is a robust evolutionary framework for the host lineages. Four assemblages are known to harbour plastids derived from red algae and, according to the controversial chromalveolate hypothesis, these all share a common ancestry. Phylogenomic analyses have consistently shown that stramenopiles and alveolates are closely related, but haptophytes and cryptophytes remain contentious; they have been proposed to branch together with several heterotrophic groups in the newly erected Hacrobia. Here, we tested this question by producing a large expressed sequence tag dataset for the katablepharid Roombia truncata , one of the last hacrobian lineages for which genome-level data are unavailable, and combined this dataset with the recently completed genome of the cryptophyte Guillardia theta to build an alignment composed of 258 genes. Our analyses strongly support haptophytes as sister to the SAR group, possibly together with telonemids and centrohelids. We also confirmed the common origin of katablepharids and cryptophytes, but these lineages were not related to other hacrobians; instead, they branch with plants. Our study resolves the evolutionary position of haptophytes, an ecologically critical component of the oceans, and proposes a new hypothesis for the origin of cryptophytes.


1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranajit Chakraborty

Recent studies with comparative data on base sequences of homologous DNAs or amino acid sequences of homologous proteins indicate that simultaneous estimation of phylogenetic structure and time of divergence is often cumbersome and time consuming. On the other hand, when the topology of an evolutionary tree is known, it is shown in this paper that the least squares theory may be applied to obtain simple estimates of the relative time lengths for each segment of the tree under the assumption of uniform random substitutions in each segment. The method is illustrated with amino acid sequence data on various globin molecules and cytochrome c. The evolutionary significance of some of the estimates is also discussed.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Barker ◽  
Zheng Li ◽  
Thomas I. Kidder ◽  
Chris R. Reardon ◽  
Zhao Lai ◽  
...  

AbstractPremise of the studyLike many other flowering plants, members of the Compositae (Asteraceae) have a polyploid ancestry. Previous analyses found evidence for an ancient duplication or possibly triplication in the early evolutionary history of the family. We sought to better place this paleopolyploidy in the phylogeny and assess its nature.MethodsWe sequenced new transcriptomes for Barnadesia, the lineage sister to all other Compositae, and four representatives of closely related families. Using a recently developed algorithm, MAPS, we analyzed nuclear gene family phylogenies for evidence of paleopolyploidy.Key resultsWe found that the previously recognized Compositae paleopolyploidy is also in the ancestry of the Calyceraceae. Our phylogenomic analyses uncovered evidence for a successive second round of genome duplication among all sampled Compositae except Barnadesia.ConclusionsOur analyses of new samples with new tools provide a revised view of paleopolyploidy in the Compositae. Together with results from a high density Lactuca linkage map, our results suggest that the Compositae and Calyceraceae have a common paleotetraploid ancestor and most Compositae are descendants of a paleohexaploid. Although paleohexaploids have been previously identified, this is the first example where the paleotetraploid and paleohexaploid lineages have survived over tens of millions of years. The complex polyploidy in the ancestry of the Compositae and Calyceraceae represents a unique opportunity to study the long-term evolutionary fates and consequences of different ploidal levels.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (11) ◽  
pp. 2604-2619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elodie Laine ◽  
Yasaman Karami ◽  
Alessandra Carbone

Abstract The systematic and accurate description of protein mutational landscapes is a question of utmost importance in biology, bioengineering, and medicine. Recent progress has been achieved by leveraging on the increasing wealth of genomic data and by modeling intersite dependencies within biological sequences. However, state-of-the-art methods remain time consuming. Here, we present Global Epistatic Model for predicting Mutational Effects (GEMME) (www.lcqb.upmc.fr/GEMME), an original and fast method that predicts mutational outcomes by explicitly modeling the evolutionary history of natural sequences. This allows accounting for all positions in a sequence when estimating the effect of a given mutation. GEMME uses only a few biologically meaningful and interpretable parameters. Assessed against 50 high- and low-throughput mutational experiments, it overall performs similarly or better than existing methods. It accurately predicts the mutational landscapes of a wide range of protein families, including viral ones and, more generally, of much conserved families. Given an input alignment, it generates the full mutational landscape of a protein in a matter of minutes. It is freely available as a package and a webserver at www.lcqb.upmc.fr/GEMME/.


2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 804-837 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Hendricks

AbstractExtant members of the neogastropod family Conidae (cone snails) are renowned for their often dazzling shell coloration patterns and venomous feeding habits. Many cone snail species have also been described from the fossil record, but to date have been little used to understand the evolutionary history of extant clades. The cone snail fauna of the Miocene Gatun Formation of Colón Province, Panama is especially important for understanding the temporal and biogeographic history of tropical American Conidae. Intensive, focused collecting from an exposure of the lower Gatun Formation (deposited ca. 11–10 Ma) resulted in the discovery of nearly 900 specimens of Conidae. Remarkably, many of these well-preserved specimens exhibit revealed coloration patterns when exposed to ultraviolet light. The fluorescing coloration patterns were used in conjunction with other features of shell morphology to differentiate species and, in most cases, evaluate their potential relationships to members of the extant tropical American fauna. Nine species are fully described from this locality, one of which is recognized as new:Conus(Stephanoconus)woodringin. sp. At least one, and perhaps more, additional Conidae species are also present at the study locality. The diversity of this Conidae fauna is considered moderate relative to other recently analyzed tropical American fossil assemblages. The phylogenetic diversity of the assemblage, however, is noteworthy: six of the ten species can be confidently assigned to six different clades of extant Conidae, providing potentially useful calibration points for future phylogenetic studies.http://zoobank.org/8fe00c31-8f3f-4514-85af-29068e468cd3


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Pearse ◽  
Pierre Legendre ◽  
Pedro Peres-Neto ◽  
T. Jonathan Davies

1AbstractAimCommunity phylogenetic studies use information about species’ evolutionary relationships to understand the processes of community ecological assembly. A central premise of the field is that species’ evolution maps onto ecological patterns, and phylogeny reveals something more than species’ traits alone. We argue, therefore, that there is a need to better understand and model the interaction of phylogeny with species’ traits and community composition.InnovationWe outline a new method that identifies clades with unusual ecological structures, based around partitioning the variation of species’ site occupancies (β-diversity). Eco-phylogenetic theory would predict that these clades should also demonstrate distinct evolutionary trajectories. We suggest that modelling the evolution of independent trait data in these clades represents a strong test of whether there is an association between species’ ecological structure and evolutionary history.Main conclusionsUsing an empirical dataset of mammals from around the world, we identify two clades of rodents that tend not to co-occur (are phylogenetically overdispersed), and then find independent evidence of slower rates of body mass evolution in these clades. We suggest that our approach, which assumes nothing about the mode of species’ trait evolution but rather seeks to explain it using ecological information, presents a new way to examine eco-phylogenetic structure.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 1577-1592 ◽  
Author(s):  
XiaoYun Wang ◽  
Dan Liang ◽  
Wei Jin ◽  
MingKun Tang ◽  
Shalayiwu ◽  
...  

Abstract Pikas are widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere and are highly adapted to cold and alpine environments. They are one of the most complex and problematic groups in mammalian systematics, and the origin and evolutionary history of extant pikas remain controversial. In this study, we sequenced the whole coding sequences of 105 pika samples (29 named species and 1 putative new species) and obtained DNA data for more than 10,000 genes. Our phylogenomic analyses recognized four subgenera of extant pikas: Alienauroa, Conothoa, Ochotona, and Pika. The interrelationships between the four subgenera were strongly resolved as (Conothoa, (Alienauroa, (Ochotona, Pika))), with the mountain group Conothoa being the sister group of all other pikas. Our divergence time and phylogeographic analyses indicated that the last common ancestor of extant pikas first occurred on in the middle Miocene, ∼14 Ma. The emergence of opportunities related to the climate, food supply, and spreading paths in concert promoted the dispersal of pikas from the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) to other parts of Eurasia and North America. We found that the genes that were positively selected in the early evolution of pikas were most concentrated in functional categories related to cold tolerance. These results suggest that the QTP may have served as a training ground for cold tolerance in early pikas, which gives pikas a great advantage when the climate continued to cool after the middle Miocene. Our study highlights the importance of the QTP as a center of origin for many cold-adapted animals.


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