What is it about?
Comb jellies (phylum Ctenophora) are an interesting animal group for studies on development and body symmetry. Previous studies have been done in order to classify this broad group of animals, most based on morphology and single gene analyses. We constructed evolutionary trees (phylogenies) of this group using molecular data from public databases (eg. GenBank) and state of art computational methods for evolutionary history reconstruction. We compare our results with relationships proposed on previous studies by other authors.
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Why is it important?
We did this re-analysis using data from public databases for phylogenetic reconstruction purposes. We chose this particular group to commemorate 150th anniversary of Haeckel's tree of life publication. Haeckel did detailed illustrations and descriptions of specimens belonging to this phylum. Last molecular studies (Podar et al.., 2001) were performed using single genes and currently classifications rely mostly on morphology data. We revisit this problem using current computational methods and genetic data from several genes.
Perspectives
Public databases and computational methods are valious tools to delimit new directions for biological research. Re-analysis studies like this one could be used to define key points to concentrate efforts in further studies. Taking advantage of available molecular data (even if it was collected for a different purpose) for phylogenetic reconstructions is an efficient way to plan accurately further specimen sampling and DNA sequencing to obtain a better picture of evolutionary relationships of certain groups.
MSc Nicolás D. Franco-Sierra
Instituto de Investigacion de Recursos Biologicos Alexander von Humboldt
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Revisiting the phylogeny of phylum Ctenophora: a molecular perspective, F1000Research, December 2016, Faculty of 1000, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.10426.1.
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Resources
Phylogenetic trees based on protein sequences of IPNS and GFP-like genes (on left) and rRNA loci (on right).
Trees were constructed using Bayesian inference and maximum likelihood methods and consistent topologies were found within methods. Support values are shown at nodes in the form of posterior probability/bootstrap value.
Data used for this project
The raw data and scripts used for this project are available in Zenodo.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
