Disentangling the relationship of the Australian marsupial orders using retrotransposon and evolutionary network analyses

  • The ancestors to the Australian marsupials entered Australia around 60 (54-72) million years ago from Antarctica, and radiated into the four living orders Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia, Diprotodontia and Notoryctemorphia. The relationship between the four Australian marsupial orders has been a long-standing question, because different phylogenetic studies were not able to consistently reconstruct the same topology. Initial in silico analysis of the Tasmanian devil genome and experimental screening in the seven marsupial orders revealed 20 informative transposable element insertions for resolving the inter- and intraordinal relationships of Australian and South American orders. However, the retrotransposon insertions support three conflicting topologies regarding Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia and Notoryctemorphia, indicating that the split between the three orders may be best understood as a network. This finding is supported by a phylogenetic re-analysis of nuclear gene sequences, using a consensus network approach that allows depicting hidden phylogenetic conflict, otherwise lost when forcing the data into a bifurcating tree. The consensus network analysis agrees with the transposable element analysis in that all possible topologies regarding Peramelemorphia, Dasyuromorphia, and Notoryctemorphia in a rooted four-taxon topology are equally well supported. In addition, retrotransposon insertion data supports the South American order Didelphimorphia being the sistergroup to all other living marsupial orders. The four Australian orders originated within three million years at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. The rapid divergences left conflicting phylogenetic information in the genome possibly generated by incomplete lineage sorting or introgressive hybridisation, leaving the relationship among Australian marsupial orders unresolvable as a bifurcating process million years later.

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Metadaten
Author:Susanne GallusGND, Axel JankeORCiD, Vikas Kumar, Maria Anna NilssonORCiD
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-372475
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evv052
ISSN:1759-6653
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25786431
Parent Title (English):Genome biology and evolution
Publisher:Oxford Univ. Press
Place of publication:Oxford
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2015/03/18
Date of first Publication:2015/03/18
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2015/03/28
Tag:Australian marsupials; Notoryctes; SINE; marsupial phylogeny; network analysis; retrotransposons
Volume:7
Issue:4
Page Number:23
First Page:985
Last Page:992
Note:
© The Author(s) 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com
HeBIS-PPN:369053133
Institutes:Biowissenschaften / Biowissenschaften
Angeschlossene und kooperierende Institutionen / Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft
Biowissenschaften / Institut für Ökologie, Evolution und Diversität
Fachübergreifende Einrichtungen / Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum (BiK-F)
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 59 Tiere (Zoologie) / 590 Tiere (Zoologie)
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Sammlung Biologie / Sondersammelgebiets-Volltexte
Licence (English):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell 4.0