A phylogenetic hypothesis is presented illustrating relationships among 23 extant sturgeon species based on nucleotide data from five mitochondrial genes (cytochrome b, NADH5, control region, 16S, and 12S). The tree supports our previous hypotheses regarding relationships among species of Acipenser and Huso. The introduction of Scaphirhynchus and Pseudoscaphirhynchus to the analysis does not ch...

Phylogenetic reconstruction is a fast-growing field that is enriched by different statistical approaches and by findings and applications in a broad range of biological areas. Fundamental to these are the mathematical models used to describe the patterns of DNA base substitution and amino acid replacement. These may become some of the basic models for comparative genome research. We discuss the...

The Valvatacea is one the most ecologically important, taxonomically diverse, and widespread groups of postPalaeozoic (i.e. modern) Asteroidea. Classification within the group has been historically problematic. We present a comprehensively sampled, three-gene (12S, 16S, early-stage histone H3) molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Valvatacea. We include five of the six families within the Paxi...

Phylogenetic trees: Recent advances in statistical methods for phylogenetic reconstruction and genetic diversity analysis were discussed. At the present time, three different methods, i.e., neighbor-joining, parsimony, and likelihood methods, are commonly used for constructing phylogenetic trees from DNA or protein sequences. Neighbor-joining is simplest and produces reasonable trees in most ca...