TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gallus, Susanne
A1  - Janke, Axel
A1  - Kumar, Vikas
A1  - Nilsson, Maria Anna
T1  - Disentangling the relationship of the Australian marsupial orders using retrotransposon and evolutionary network analyses
T2  - Genome biology and evolution
N2  - 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.
KW  - Notoryctes
KW  - Australian marsupials
KW  - marsupial phylogeny
KW  - retrotransposons
KW  - SINE
KW  - network analysis
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/37247
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-372475
SN  - 1759-6653
N1  - © 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
VL  - 7
IS  - 4
SP  - 985
EP  - 992
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -