background: more than 60 species of the genus lathyrus are distributed in southwest asia. it is the second largest genus of the tribe fabeae, after vicia, in the region (and in iran with 23 species). in the regional flora (flora of turkey, florairanicaand flora of iran), the genus has been divided into 9-10 sections. here we analyzed the phylogeny of lathyrus and its relationship with pisum bas...

In present study, eight isolates of the genus Curvularia, recovered from plants of the cowpea, maize and bottlebrush in Khuzestan province, were identified based on molecular phylogeny in combination with morphology. The mycelial biomass of the isolates, produced in potato-dextrose-Broth, were collected by passing through filter papers and freeze-dried. DNA was extracted using a phenol...

Mapping of mutations on a phylogeny has been a commonly used analytical tool in phylogenetics and molecular evolution. However, the common approaches for mapping mutations based on parsimony have lacked a solid statistical foundation. Here, I present a Bayesian method for mapping mutations on a phylogeny. I illustrate some of the common problems associated with using parsimony and suggest inste...

Pairwise difference analysis is a phenetic method that groups taxa on the basis of the number of differences they exhibit. Recently, pairwise difference analysis has been used to investigate the phylogenetic relationships of hominid fossils at the centre of the modern human origins debate. It has been argued that the results of these analyses disprove the African replacement model of modern hum...

Animals make up only a small fraction of the eukaryotic tree of life, yet, from our vantage point as members of the animal kingdom, the evolution of the bewildering diversity of animal forms is endlessly fascinating. In the century following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, hypotheses regarding the evolution of the major branches of the animal kingdom - their relationships to each...

Morris Goodman was a revolutionary. Together with a mere handful of like-minded scientists, Morris established himself as a leader in the molecular phylogenetic revolution of the 1960s. The effects of this revolution are most evident in this journal, which he founded in 1992. Happily for lemur biologists, one of Morris Goodman's primary interests was in reconstructing the phylogeny of the prima...

Advances in the understanding of biological radiations along tropical mountains depend on the knowledge of phylogenetic relationships among species. Here we present a species-level molecular phylogeny based on a multilocus dataset for the Andean hummingbird genus Coeligena. We compare this phylogeny to previous hypotheses of evolutionary relationships and use it as a framework to understand pat...

Sequence data from 420 bp of mitochondrial 12s ribosomal DNA and 490 bp of 16s rDNA were analyzed for 27 species of Syrphoidea (Diptera) and two outgroup taxa. Morphological data for the Pipunculidae were combined with the pipunculid molecular data set. A partition homogeneity test on these data sets revealed no significant incongruence. The pipunculid phylogeny from molecular data closely rese...

We present a large-scale molecular phylogeny that includes 320 of the 761 recognized valid species of the cone snails (Conus), one of the most diverse groups of marine molluscs, based on three mitochondrial genes (COI, 16S rDNA and 12S rDNA). This is the first phylogeny of the taxon to employ concatenated sequences of several genes, and it includes more than twice as many species as the last pu...

Infection with the endosymbiotic bacteria Wolbachia is widespread in filarial nematodes. Previous studies have suggested concordance between the phylogeny of Wolbachia with that of their nematode hosts. However, there is only one published molecular phylogenetic study of filarial species, based on the 5S rRNA gene spacer. The phylogeny proposed by this study is partially incongruent with previo...