A critique of Rossberg et al.: Noise obscures the genetic signal of meiobiotal ecospecies in ecogenomic datasets.
A critique of Rossberg et al.: Noise obscures the genetic signal of meiobiotal ecospecies in ecogenomic datasets.
复制标题
对 Rossberg 等人的批评：噪声掩盖了生态基因组数据集中的减生物生态种的遗传信号。
DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2013.3076
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Morgan MJ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Morgan MJ
High-throughput sequencing of DNA marker genes recovered from environmental samples (known as ecogenomics or metabarcoding) is an emerging tool for understanding patterns and processes in ecology and biodiversity [1]. The recent paper ‘Are there species smaller than 1 mm?’[2] was inspired by a re-examination of published metabarcoding data from meiobiotic communities (including meiofauna and protists less than 1 mm)[3, 4] which did not support the existence of well-defined genetic species. Rossberg et al.(hereafter referred to as RRM) noted that this observation is ‘at odds with much of the existing theoretical literature’[2, p. 2]. Moreover, there are many empirical studies that demonstrate well-defined genetic species in meiobiotal organisms using phylogenetic, biological and morphological criteria [5–8]. Here, we offer a contrasting view highlighting a number of analytical and theoretical issues that cast doubt on their conclusion that available data are consistent with the hypothesis that ‘ecospecies form only for organisms with body sizes exceeding the millimetre scale’[2, p. 6]. We provide new analyses to support our view that the cited observations for meiobiotic communities are affected by analytical artefacts generated by errors in the pyrosequencing reads that were not fully corrected in the original studies. We demonstrate that removing the noise generated by these errors results in small organisms exhibiting signals of species formation similar to those of larger species. Models developed by RRM showed that ecospecies are unlikely to form under high values of mK, the product of mutation rate (m) and carrying capacity (K). Additionally, they showed that under conditions where ecospecies form, a lineage-through-time (LTT) plot on double-logarithmic axes exhibits a characteristic shape, including a plateau that separates the intra-specific and inter-specific diversification timescales. RRM compared their model predictions to published results using an analogue of LTT plots (the relationship between
