A phylogenetic hot spot for evolutionary novelty in Middle American treefrogs.

A phylogenetic perspective on elevational species richness patterns in Middle American treefrogs: why so few species in lowland tropical rainforests?

Differences in species richness at different elevations are widespread and important for conservation, but the causes of these patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we use a phylogenetic perspective to address the evolutionary and biogeographic processes that underlie elevational diversity patterns within a region. We focus on a diverse but well-studied fauna of tropical amphibians, the hyli...

Community assembly through evolutionary diversification and dispersal in Middle American treefrogs.

How are ecologically diverse organisms added to local assemblages to create the community structure we see today? In general, within a given region or community, a given trait (character state) may either evolve in situ or be added through dispersal after having evolved elsewhere. Here, we develop simple metrics to quantify the relative importance of these processes and then apply them to a cas...

Phylogenetics, classification, and biogeography of the treefrogs (Amphibia: Anura: Arboranae).

A phylogenetic analysis of sequences from 503 species of hylid frogs and four outgroup taxa resulted in 16,128 aligned sites of 19 genes. The molecular data were subjected to a maximum likelihood analysis that resulted in a new phylogenetic tree of treefrogs. A conservative new classification based on the tree has (1) three families composing an unranked taxon, Arboranae, (2) nine subfamilies (...

Community Assembly through Evolutionary Diversification and Dispersal in Middle Ammerican Treefrogs

Identification of a New Genomic Hot Spot of Evolutionary Diversification of Protein Function

Establishment of phylogenetic relationships remains a challenging task because it is based on computational analysis of genomic hot spots that display species-specific sequence variations. Here, we identify a species-specific thymine-to-guanine sequence variation in the Glrb gene which gives rise to species-specific splice donor sites in the Glrb genes of mouse and bushbaby. The resulting splic...