This study unravels the evolution and biogeographic history of the globally distributed ant genus Crematogaster on the basis of a molecular phylogeny, reconstructed from five nuclear protein-coding genes and a total of 3384 bp of sequence data. A particular emphasis is placed on the evolutionary history of these ants in the Malagasy region. Bayesian and likelihood analyses performed on a datase...

1055-7903/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2008.05.006 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 515 294 1337. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.M. Serb). Evolutionary relationships of the Pectinidae were examined using two mitochondrial genes (12S rRNA, 16S rRNA) and one nuclear gene (Histone H3) for 46 species. Outgroup taxa from Propeamussidae, Spondylidae and Limidae were...

Molecular data have converged on a consensus about the genus-level phylogeny of extant platyrrhine monkeys, but for most extinct taxa and certainly for those older than the Pleistocene we must rely upon morphological evidence from fossils. This raises the question as to how well anatomical data mirror molecular phylogenies and how best to deal with discrepancies between the molecular and morpho...

1055-7903/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2008.04.003 * Corresponding author. Fax: +33 01 40 79 38 44. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Dettaï). The interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein (IRBP) coding gene has been used with success for the large-scale phylogeny of mammals. However, its phylogenetic worth had not been explored in Actinopterygians. We explore...

DNA-based taxonomy provides a convenient and reliable tool for species delimitation, especially in organisms in which morphological discrimination is difficult or impossible, such as many algal taxa. A group with a long history of confusing species circumscriptions is the morphologically plastic Boodlea complex, comprising the marine green algal genera Boodlea, Cladophoropsis, Phyllodictyon and...

From 1971 to 1985, Carl Woese and colleagues generated oligonucleotide catalogs of 16S/18S rRNAs from more than 400 organisms. Using these incomplete and imperfect data, Carl and his colleagues developed unprecedented insights into the structure, function, and evolution of the large RNA components of the translational apparatus. They recognized a third domain of life, revealed the phylogenetic ...

Evolution by natural selection is responsible for the divergence of species populations through three primary mechanisms: populations being altered over evolutionary time and speciating into separate branches, hybridization of two previously distinct species into one, or termination by extinction. Given the vastness of time elapsed since life first emerged on this planet, many distinct species ...

Knowledge of phylogeny is of fundamental importance for understanding evolution. It has become an indispensable tool in modern genomics as a framework for interpreting genomes and metagenomes, for understanding evolution of genes, proteins, and noncoding RNAs as well as different types of regulations including secondary RNA and protein structures, and for reconstructing ancestral genomes [1]. T...

In their article titled ‘‘Estimating species trees using approximate Bayesian computation’’ Fan and Kubatko present an algorithm called ST-ABC to sample the posterior distribution of species trees (Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 59: 354– 363). The authors claim that ST-ABC is an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) algorithm. Here, I argue that one of the steps in their algorithm diffe...