Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 12, 650-656, Copyright © 1995 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
S Cho, A Mitchell, JC Regier, C Mitter, RW Poole, TP Friedlander and S Zhao
Molecular systematists need increased access to nuclear genes. Highly
conserved, low copy number protein-encoding nuclear genes have attractive
features for phylogenetic inference but have heretofore been applied mostly
to very ancient divergences. By virtue of their synonymous substitutions,
such genes should contain a wealth of information about lower-level
taxonomic relationships as well, with the advantage that amino acid
conservatism makes both alignment and primer definition straightforward. We
tested this postulate for the elongation factor-1 alpha (EF-1 alpha) gene
in the noctuid moth subfamily Heliothinae, which has probably diversified
since the middle Tertiary. We sequenced 1,240 bp in 18 taxa representing
heliothine groupings strongly supported by previous morphological and
allozyme studies. The single most parsimonious gene tree and the
neighbor-joining tree for all nucleotides show almost complete concordance
with the morphological tree. Homoplasy and pairwise divergence levels are
low, transition/transversion ratios are high, and phylogenetic information
is spread evenly across gene regions. The EF-1 alpha gene and presumably
other highly conserved genes hold much promise for phylogenetics of
Tertiary age eukaryote groups.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A highly conserved nuclear gene for low-level phylogenetics: elongation factor-1 alpha recovers morphology-based tree for heliothine moths
Department of Entomology, University of Maryland at College Park 20742, USA.
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