The aim of the present study was to infer a substantially larger, more evenly sampled, phylogenetic tree for Caryophyllaceae in order to more confidently resolve relationships within this clade. This would allow us to evaluate previous classification schemes and to infer the evolution of a number of characters that have figured prominently in higher-level taxonomic treatments. We have inferred ...

Historical patterns of morphological evolution and ecology in the Boletales are largely unresolved but appear to involve extensive convergence. We studied phylogenetic relationships of Boletales based on two datasets. The nuc-lsu dataset is broadly sampled and includes roughly 30% of the described species of Boletales and 51 outgroup taxa across the Hymenomycetes. The multigene dataset (nuc-ssu...

Phylogenetic relationships among New World suboscine birds were studied using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences. New World suboscines were shown to constitute two distinct lineages, one apparently consisting of the single species Sapayoa aenigma, the other made up of the remaining 1000+ species of New World suboscines. With the exception of Sapayoa, monophyly of New World suboscines was s...

Short interspersed repetitive elements, or SINEs, are tRNA-derived retroposons that are dispersed throughout eukaryotic genomes and can be present in well over 10(4) total copies. The enormous volume of SINE amplifications per organism makes them important evolutionary agents for shaping the diversity of genomes, and the irreversible, independent nature of their insertion allows them to be used...

Arthropods in general, and the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster (Figure. 1A), in particular, have traditionally served as models in developmental biology for understanding morphology or for biomedical reasons providing a key to the development of studies on vertebrates, as an important model of genetic organism. All the fundamentals of classical genetics were built largely through studies on ...