Computational biomechanics changes our view on insect head evolution
Computational biomechanics changes our view on insect head evolution
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2016.2412
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发表时间：
2017-02-08
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Fagan, Michael J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Blanke, Alexander;Watson, Peter J.;Fagan, Michael J.
尽管进行了大规模的分子尝试，但蜻蜓、蚂蚁和新翅目基本有翼昆虫血统的关系仍未解决。其他数据来源，如形态学，存在所考虑的结构的功能依赖关系不明确的问题，这可能会误导系统发育推断。在这里，我们首次将生物力学和系统发育学结合起来，使用两种先进的工程技术--多体动力学分析和有限元分析--来客观地识别昆虫头部结构中的功能联系，这些结构传统上被用来论证昆虫的基本有翼关系。有了一个前所未有的详细的生物力学模型，我们能够研究在生物真实载荷下的形态特征的力学，即咬合。我们表明，一系列头部特征，主要是脊线、内骨骼元素和关节，确实相互机械地联系在一起。对聚焦于头部特征的形态数据矩阵中的特征状态相关性的分析表明，这些机械链接结构的相关性非常显著。基于相关分析的不同数据排除方案下的系统发育树重建明确支持蜻蜓和蚂蚁的姐妹群关系。这里提出的生物力学和系统发育学相结合的方法可能是一种很有前途的方法来评估许多生物体的功能依赖性，以增加我们对表型进化的理解。
Despite large-scale molecular attempts, the relationships of the basal winged insect lineages dragonflies, mayflies and neopterans, are still unresolved. Other data sources, such as morphology, suffer from unclear functional dependencies of the structures considered, which might mislead phylogenetic inference. Here, we assess this problem by combining for the first time biomechanics with phylogenetics using two advanced engineering techniques, multibody dynamics analysis and finite-element analysis, to objectively identify functional linkages in insect head structures which have been used traditionally to argue basal winged insect relationships. With a biomechanical model of unprecedented detail, we are able to investigate the mechanics of morphological characters under biologically realistic load, i. e. biting. We show that a range of head characters, mainly ridges, endoskeletal elements and joints, are indeed mechanically linked to each other. An analysis of character state correlation in a morphological data matrix focused on head characters shows highly significant correlation of these mechanically linked structures. Phylogenetic tree reconstruction under different data exclusion schemes based on the correlation analysis unambiguously supports a sistergroup relationship of dragonflies and mayflies. The combination of biomechanics and phylogenetics as it is proposed here could be a promising approach to assess functional dependencies in many organisms to increase our understanding of phenotypic evolution.