A Screen for Gene Paralogies Delineating Evolutionary Branching Order of Early Metazoa.

ABSTRACT: The evolutionary diversification of animals is one of Earth's greatest marvels, yet its earliest steps are shrouded in mystery. Animals, the monophyletic clade known as Metazoa, evolved wildly divergent multicellular life strategies featuring ciliated sensory epithelia. In many lineages epithelial sensoria became coupled to increasingly complex nervous systems. Currently, different phylogenetic analyses of single-copy genes support mutually-exclusive possibilities that either Porifera or Ctenophora is sister to all other animals. Resolving this dilemma would advance the ecological and evolutionary understanding of the first animals and the evolution of nervous systems. Here we describe a comparative phylogenetic approach based on gene duplications. We computationally identify and analyze g

SUBMITTER: Erives A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7003098 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature