Journal
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 27, Issue 9, Pages 1983-1987Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msq089
Keywords
multigene analysis; EST; Metazoa; Ctenophora; Porifera; long-branch attraction; saturation
Funding
- German Science Foundation (DFG) [Wo896/6-1, 2, Wi 2116/2-1, 2]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Canadian Research Chair Program
- Universite de Montreal
- Reseau Quebecois de Calcul de Haute Performance
- DFG
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Despite expanding data sets and advances in phylogenomic methods, deep-level metazoan relationships remain highly controversial. Recent phylogenomic analyses depart from classical concepts in recovering ctenophores as the earliest branching metazoan taxon and propose a sister-group relationship between sponges and cnidarians (e.g., Dunn CW, Hejnol A, Matus DQ, et al. (18 co-authors). 2008. Broad phylogenomic sampling improves resolution of the animal tree of life. Nature 452:745-749). Here, we argue that these results are artifacts stemming from insufficient taxon sampling and long-branch attraction (LBA). By increasing taxon sampling from previously unsampled nonbilaterians and using an identical gene set to that reported by Dunn et al., we recover monophyletic Porifera as the sister group to all other Metazoa. This suggests that the basal position of the fast-evolving Ctenophora proposed by Dunn et al. was due to LBA and that broad taxon sampling is of fundamental importance to metazoan phylogenomic analyses. Additionally, saturation in the Dunn et al. character set is comparatively high, possibly contributing to the poor support for some nonbilaterian nodes.
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