4 Per Alström, Keith N. Barnes, Urban Olsson, F. Keith Barker, Paulette Bloomer, 5 Aleem Ahmed Khan, Masood Ahmed Qureshi, Alban Guillaumet, Pierre-André Crochet, 6 Peter G. Ryan 7 8 a Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese 9 Academy of Sciences, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, P. R. China 10 b Swedish Species Information Centre, Swedish Univer...

A goal of modern taxonomy is to develop classifications that reflect current phylogenetic relationships and are as stable as possible given the inherent uncertainties in much of the tree of life. Here, we provide an in-depth phylogenetic analysis, based on 14 nuclear loci comprising 10,305 base pairs of aligned sequence data from all but two species of the turtle family Kinosternidae, to determ...

The Sycoecinae is one of five chalcid subfamilies of fig wasps that are mostly dependent on Ficus inflorescences for reproduction. Here, we analysed two mitochondrial (COI, Cytb) and four nuclear genes (ITS2, EF-1α, RpL27a, mago nashi) from a worldwide sample of 56 sycoecine species. Various alignment and partitioning strategies were used to test the stability of major clades. All topologies es...

Nocardia species identification is difficult due to a complex and rapidly changing taxonomy, the failure of 16S rRNA and cellular fatty acid analysis to discriminate many species, and the unreliability of biochemical testing. Here, Nocardia species identification was achieved through multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) of gyrase B of the β subunit of DNA topoisomerase (gyrB), 16S rRNA (16S), su...

The most recent phylogenetic analysis of the genus Phytophthora was completed in 2008 (Blair et al., 2008) and utilized 8.1 kb of sequence data from seven nuclear loci. Given the large number of species that have recently been described, this study was undertaken to broaden the available information on the phylogeny of the genus. A total of 166 isolates representing 92 recognized species and 17...

To obtain more information on the much-debated definition of prokaryotic species, we investigated the borders of Haemophilus influenzae by comparative analysis of H. influenzae reference strains with closely related bacteria including strains assigned to Haemophilus haemolyticus, cryptic genospecies biotype IV, and the never formally validated species "Haemophilus intermedius". Multilocus seque...

Sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene has been widely used for the classification of microorganisms. However, we have been unable to clearly identify five Flavobacterium species isolated from a freshwater by using the gene as a single marker, because the evolutionary history is incomplete and the pace of DNA substitutions is relatively rapid in the bacteria. In this study, we tried to classify...

The melanogaster species group of Drosophila (subgenus Sophophora) has long been a favored model for evolutionary studies because of its morphological and ecological diversity and wide geographic distribution. However, phylogenetic relationships among species and subgroups within this lineage are not well understood. We reconstructed the phylogeny of 17 species representing 7 "oriental" species...

Submitted: 6 January 2014 Accepted: 25 February 2014 doi:10.1111/zsc.12053 Olave, M., Avila, L.J., Sites Jr., J.W., Morando, M. (2014) Multilocus phylogeny of the widely distributed South American lizard clade Eulaemus (Liolaemini, Liolaemus). — Zoologica Scripta, 43, 323–337. The lizard genus Liolaemus and different clades within it have been the focus of several recent phylogenetic studies ma...