different species of gazelles are among the most endangered mammals on the asian steppes and occur in the central, southern and northwestern regions of iran. the previous conservation efforts in this region have been incomplete due to confusion about the phylogenetic relationship among various populations. so that, different conservation programs such as ex-situ breeding and transfer of captive...

background: feline hemotropic mycoplasmas are parasites of erythrocytes and include three species, mycoplasma haemofelis, candidatus mycoplasma haemominutum and candidatus mycoplasma turicensis. diagnosis of the infection with these microorganisms can be carried out using conventional assays such as blood cytology. however, these assays have a low accuracy and a high rate of false-positive resu...

A priori selection of models for use in phylogeny estimation from molecular sequence data is increasingly important as the number and complexity of available models increases. The Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the derivative decision-theoretic (DT) approaches rely on a conservative approximation to estimate the posterior probability of a given model. Here, we extended the DT method b...

The genomics revolution offers great promise for resolving the phylogeny of living taxa, but does it offer any benefits for reconstructing relationships among extinct (fossil) taxa? Superficially, the answer would seem to be "no," given that molecular data cannot be obtained for most fossil taxa. However, because fossil taxa often interdigitate among living taxa on the Tree of Life, molecular d...

Bayesian phylogenetics has recently been proposed as a powerful method for inferring molecular phylogenies, and it has been reported that the mammalian and some plant phylogenies were resolved by using this method. The statistical confidence of interior branches as judged by posterior probabilities in Bayesian analysis is generally higher than that as judged by bootstrap probabilities in maximu...

A synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology is emerging that identifies how genetic variation and evolution within one species can shape the ecological properties of entire communities and, in turn, how community context can govern evolutionary processes and patterns. This synthesis incorporates research on the ecology and evolution within communities over short timescales (c...

Supermatrix and supertree methods are two strategies advocated for phylogenetic analysis of sequence data from multiple gene loci, especially when some species are missing at some loci. The supermatrix method concatenates sequences from multiple genes into a data supermatrix for phylogenetic analysis, and ignores differences in evolutionary dynamics among the genes. The supertree method analyze...

Newcastle disease virus (NDV) is a prototype member of avian paramyxovirus serotype 1 (APMV-1), which causes severe and contagious disease in the commercial poultry and wild birds. In this study, we report the results of phylogenetic analyses of recent NDVs isolated from Markazi province of Iran during a recent outbreak in the commercial broiler with respiratory signs and digestive system lesio...

Since their advent, supertrees have been increasingly used in large-scale evolutionary studies requiring a phylogenetic framework and substantial efforts have been devoted to developing a wide variety of supertree methods (SMs). Recent advances in supertree theory have allowed the implementation of maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian SMs, based on using an exponential distribution to model inc...

The phenotype represents a critical interface between the genome and the environment in which organisms live and evolve. Phenotypic characters also are a rich source of biodiversity data for tree building, and they enable scientists to reconstruct the evolutionary history of organisms, including most fossil taxa, for which genetic data are unavailable. Therefore, phenotypic data are necessary f...