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MBE Advance Access published online on July 13, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msm136
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Article

Phylogenomic Data Analyses Provide Evidence That Xenarthra and Afrotheria are Sistergroups

Björn Hallström1, Morgan Kullberg1, Maria Nilsson1 and Axel Janke1

1 Department of Cell and Organism Biology, Division of Evolutionary Molecular Systematics, University of Lund, Sölvegatan 29, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden

Correspondence to: Björn Hallström; email: bjorn.hallstrom{at}cob.lu.se, Phone: +46/46/ 222 7862, Fax: +46/46/147874

Received for publication May 11, 2007. Accepted for publication June 25, 2007.

The phylogenetic positions of the four clades, Euarchontoglires, Laurasiatheria, Afrotheria and Xenarthra, have been major issues in the recent discussion of basal relationships among placental mammals. However, despite considerable efforts these relationships, crucial to the understanding of eutherian evolution and biogeography, have remained essentially unresolved. Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatheria are generally joined into a common clade (Boreoeutheria), while the position of Afrotheria and Xenarthra relative to Boreoeutheria has been equivocal in spite of the use of comprehensive amounts of nuclear encoded sequences, or the application of genome-level characters such as retroposons. The probable reason for this uncertainty is that the divergences took place long time ago and within a narrow temporal window, leaving only short common branches. With the aim of further examining basal eutherian relationships we have collected conserved protein coding sequences from eleven placental mammals, a marsupial and a bird, whose nuclear genomes have been largely sequenced. The length of the alignment of homologous sequences representing each individual species is 2,168,859 nucleotides. This number of sites, representing 2840 protein coding genes, exceeds by a considerable margin that of any previous study. The phylogenetic analysis joined Xenarthra and Afrotheria on a common branch, Atlantogenata. This topology was found to fit the data significantly better than the alternative trees.

Key Words: Atlantogenata • phylogenomics • placental mammals • phylogeny • Xenarthra • Afrotheria


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