What can tell us available molecular data about evolution of comb jellies?

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.