TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kriegs, Jan Ole
A1  - Matzke, Andreas
A1  - Churakov, Gennady
A1  - Kuritzin, Andrej
A1  - Mayr, Gerald
A1  - Brosius, Jürgen
A1  - Schmitz, Jürgen
T1  - Waves of genomic hitchhikers shed light on the evolution of gamebirds (Aves: Galliformes) : research article
T2  - BMC evolutionary biology
N2  - Background The phylogenetic tree of Galliformes (gamebirds, including megapodes, currassows, guinea fowl, New and Old World quails, chicken, pheasants, grouse, and turkeys) has been considerably remodeled over the last decades as new data and analytical methods became available. Analyzing presence/absence patterns of retroposed elements avoids the problems of homoplastic characters inherent in other methodologies. In gamebirds, chicken repeats 1 (CR1) are the most prevalent retroposed elements, but little is known about the activity of their various subtypes over time. Ascertaining the fixation patterns of CR1 elements would help unravel the phylogeny of gamebirds and other poorly resolved avian clades. Results We analyzed 1,978 nested CR1 elements and developed a multidimensional approach taking advantage of their transposition in transposition character (TinT) to characterize the fixation patterns of all 22 known chicken CR1 subtypes. The presence/absence patterns of those elements that were active at different periods of gamebird evolution provided evidence for a clade (Cracidae + (Numididae + (Odontophoridae + Phasianidae))) not including Megapodiidae; and for Rollulus as the sister taxon of the other analyzed Phasianidae. Genomic trace sequences of the turkey genome further demonstrated that the endangered African Congo Peafowl (Afropavo congensis) is the sister taxon of the Asian Peafowl (Pavo), rejecting other predominantly morphology-based groupings, and that phasianids are monophyletic, including the sister taxa Tetraoninae and Meleagridinae. Conclusions The TinT information concerning relative fixation times of CR1 subtypes enabled us to efficiently investigate gamebird phylogeny and to reconstruct an unambiguous tree topology. This method should provide a useful tool for investigations in other taxonomic groups as well.
Y1  - 2007
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/261
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-48481
N1  - © 2007 Kriegs et al., licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 7
IS  - 190
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
ER  -