Morphological Phylogenetics in the Genomic Age

Morphological Phylogenetics in the Genomic Age

Evolutionary trees underpin virtually all of biology, and the wealth of new genomic data has enabled us to reconstruct them with increasing detail and confidence. While phenotypic (typically morphological) traits are becoming less important in reconstructing evolutionary trees, they still serve vital and unique roles in phylogenetics, even for living taxa for which vast amounts of genetic infor...

Morphological and molecular convergences in mammalian phylogenetics

Phylogenetic trees reconstructed from molecular sequences are often considered more reliable than those reconstructed from morphological characters, in part because convergent evolution, which confounds phylogenetic reconstruction, is believed to be rarer for molecular sequences than for morphologies. However, neither the validity of this belief nor its underlying cause is known. Here comparing...

Primate molecular phylogenetics in a genomic era.

A primary objective of molecular phylogenetics is to use molecular data to elucidate the evolutionary history of living organisms. Dr. Morris Goodman founded the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution as a forum where scientists could further our knowledge about the tree of life, and he recognized that the inference of species trees is a first and fundamental step to addressing many impo...

Genomic biodiversity, phylogenetics and coevolution in proteins.

Comprehensive sampling of genomic biodiversity is fast becoming a reality for some genomic regions and complete organelle genomes. Genomic biodiversity is defined as large genomic sequences from many species, and here some recent work is reviewed that demonstrates the potential benefits of genomic biodiversity for molecular evolutionary analysis and phylogenetic reconstruction. This work shows ...

Phylogenetics in the Post-Genomic Era - Session Introduction