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Small, odd and old: The mysterious Tarsius pumilus is the most basal Sulawesi tarsier.

ABSTRACT: In this study, we present the first genetic evidence of the phylogenetic position of Tarsius pumilus, the mountain tarsier of Sulawesi, Indonesia. This mysterious primate is the only Eastern tarsier species that occurs exclusively in cloud forests above 1800 m.a.s.l. It exhibits striking morphological peculiarities-most prominently its extremely reduced body size, which led to the common name of 'pygmy tarsier'. However, our results indicate that T. pumilus is not an aberrant form of a lowland tarsier, but in fact, the most basal of all Sulawesi tarsiers. Applying a Bayesian multi-locus coalescent approach, we dated the divergence between the T. pumilus lineage and the ancestor of all other extant Sulawesi tarsiers to 9.88 Mya. This is as deep as the split between the two other tarsier genera Carlito (Philippine tarsiers) and Cephalopachus (Western tarsiers), and predates further tarsier diversification on Sulawesi by around 7 Myr. The date coincides with the deepening of the marine environment between eastern and western Sulawesi, which likely led to allopatric speciation between T. pumilus or its predecessor in the west and the ancestor of all other Sulawesi tarsiers in the east. As the split preceded the emergence of permanent mountains in western Sulawesi, it is unlikely that the shift to montane habitat has driven the formation of the T. pumilus lineage.

SUBMITTER: Hagemann L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8965421 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Small, odd and old: The mysterious Tarsius pumilus is the most basal Sulawesi tarsier.

Hagemann Laura L Grow Nanda N Bohr Yvonne E-M B YEB Perwitasari-Farajallah Dyah D Duma Yulius Y Gursky Sharon L SL Merker Stefan S

Biology letters 20220330 3

In this study, we present the first genetic evidence of the phylogenetic position of Tarsius pumilus, the mountain tarsier of Sulawesi, Indonesia. This mysterious primate is the only Eastern tarsier species that occurs exclusively in cloud forests above 1800 m.a.s.l. It exhibits striking morphological peculiarities-most prominently its extremely reduced body size, which led to the common name of 'pygmy tarsier'. However, our results indicate that T. pumilus is not an aberran ...[more]

PMID: 35350878

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Project description:BackgroundThe length of a protein sequence is largely determined by its function. In certain species, it may be also affected by additional factors, such as growth temperature or acidity. In 2002, it was shown that in the bacterium Escherichia coli and in the archaeon Archaeoglobus fulgidus, protein sequences with no homologs were, on average, shorter than those with homologs (BMC Evol Biol 2:20, 2002). It is now generally accepted that in bacterial and archaeal genomes the distributions of protein length are different between sequences with and without homologs. In this study, we examine this postulate by conducting a comprehensive analysis of all annotated prokaryotic genomes and by focusing on certain exceptions.ResultsWe compared the distribution of lengths of "having homologs proteins" (HHPs) and "non-having homologs proteins" (orphans or ORFans) in all currently completely sequenced and COG-annotated prokaryotic genomes. As expected, the HHPs and ORFans have strikingly different length distributions in almost all genomes. As previously established, the HHPs, indeed are, on average, longer than the ORFans, and the length distributions for the ORFans have a relatively narrow peak, in contrast to the HHPs, whose lengths spread over a wider range of values. However, about thirty genomes do not obey these rules. Practically all genomes of Mycoplasma and Ureaplasma have atypical ORFans distributions, with the mean lengths of ORFan larger than the mean lengths of HHPs. These genera constitute over 80 % of atypical genomes.ConclusionsWe confirmed on a ubiquitous set of genomes that the previous observation of HHPs and ORFans have different gene length distributions. We also showed that Mycoplasmataceae genomes have very distinctive distributions of ORFans lengths. We offer several possible biological explanations of this phenomenon, such as an adaptation to Mycoplasmataceae's ecological niche, specifically its "quiet" co-existence with host organisms, resulting in long ABC transporters.

Dataset Information

Small, odd and old: The mysterious Tarsius pumilus is the most basal Sulawesi tarsier.

Publications

Small, odd and old: The mysterious <i>Tarsius pumilus</i> is the most basal Sulawesi tarsier.

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