iBet uBet web content aggregator. Adding the entire web to your favor.
iBet uBet web content aggregator. Adding the entire web to your favor.



Link to original content: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28904179
Phylogenomic analyses of more than 4000 nuclear loci resolve the origin of snakes among lizard families - PubMed Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 Sep;13(9):20170393.
doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0393.

Phylogenomic analyses of more than 4000 nuclear loci resolve the origin of snakes among lizard families

Jeffrey W Streicher  1   2 , John J Wiens  3
Affiliations

Phylogenomic analyses of more than 4000 nuclear loci resolve the origin of snakes among lizard families

Jeffrey W Streicher et al. Biol Lett. 2017 Sep.

Abstract

Squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes) are the most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates, with more than 10 000 species. Despite considerable effort to resolve relationships among major squamates clades, some branches have remained difficult. Among the most vexing has been the placement of snakes among lizard families, with most studies yielding only weak support for the position of snakes. Furthermore, the placement of iguanian lizards has remained controversial. Here we used targeted sequence capture to obtain data from 4178 nuclear loci from ultraconserved elements from 32 squamate taxa (and five outgroups) including representatives of all major squamate groups. Using both concatenated and species-tree methods, we recover strong support for a sister relationship between iguanian and anguimorph lizards, with snakes strongly supported as the sister group of these two clades. These analyses strongly resolve the difficult placement of snakes within squamates and show overwhelming support for the contentious position of iguanians. More generally, we provide a strongly supported hypothesis of higher-level relationships in the most species-rich tetrapod clade using coalescent-based species-tree methods and approximately 100 times more loci than previous estimates.

Keywords: lizards; phylogenomics; snakes; species-tree.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Phylogeny of squamate reptiles inferred from a species-tree analysis (Astral) of 4178 nuclear loci and 1 530 015 aligned base pairs. Tree is rooted with Homo. Light blue highlighting indicates clades congruent with the concatenated maximum-likelihood analysis (see the electronic supplementary material, figure S3). Grey highlighting indicates incongruent clades. Support values are: local posterior probabilities (species tree)/bootstrap support (concatenated). NS indicates ‘no support’ from the concatenated analysis (incongruent branch). When no numbers are shown, support values are equal to 1.0/100 (maximum support from both methods).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Uetz P, Freed P, Hošek J (eds) 2017. The Reptile Database. See http://www.reptile-database.org (accessed 28 May 2017).
    1. Sites JW Jr, Reeder TW, Wiens JJ. 2011. Phylogenetic insights on evolutionary novelties in lizards and snakes: sex, birth, bodies, niches, and venom. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 42, 227–244. (10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102710-145051) - DOI
    1. Kasturiratne A, et al. 2008. Estimation of the global burden of snakebite. PLoS Med. 5, e218 (10.1371/journal.pmed.0050218) - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Fox JW, Serrano SMT. 2007. Approaching the golden age of natural product pharmaceuticals from venom libraries: an overview of toxins and toxin-derivatives currently involved in therapeutic or diagnostic applications. Curr. Pharm. Des. 13, 2927–2934. (10.2174/138161207782023739) - DOI - PubMed
    1. Conrad JL. 2008. Phylogeny and systematics of Squamata (Reptilia) based on morphology. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 310, 1–182. (10.1206/310.1) - DOI

LinkOut - more resources