African Clawed Frogs: Toward a Phylogenetic Consensus of Diverse Data Sets

本研究项目旨在恢复Silurana属和Xenopus属的水蛙及其化石亲属的历史关系。尽管这些属的活蛙只在撒哈拉以南的非洲发现，但在非洲和南美洲发现了化石（可追溯到上白垩纪），因此表明，最近和化石物种的祖先可能在这些大陆分裂之前就已经广泛分布在这些大陆上。Silurana和Xenopus长期以来一直是生物学和生物医学研究的主题（例如，发育和遗传研究，免疫生物学，基因定位等），但我们不知道有多少种，也不知道它们彼此之间的关系，也没有任何权威机构来识别单个物种。本研究的目的是将这些分类群的现有信息（如生化、细胞学、行为学）与从成虫和发育中的幼虫身上收集的解剖学（如骨、肌、形态）数据整合起来，以便：(1)识别单个物种，(2)确定它们之间的相互关系，(3)描述染色体、核酸和形态特征的进化模式，(4)评估姐妹物种之间的分化水平。(5)结合化石和现代生物的各种数据集来重建该群体的进化史。

The proposed research project is designed to recover the historical relationships of pipid frogs of the genera Silurana and Xenopus and their fossil relatives. Whereas living frogs of these genera are only know from sub-Saharan Africa, fossils (dating from the Upper Cretaceous) occur in Africa and South America, thereby suggesting that the ancestors of the Recent and fossil species may have been widespread on these continents before they split. Silurana and Xenopus long have been the subject of biological and biomedical research (e.g., developmental and genetic studies, immunobiology, gene-mapping, etc.), yet we do not know how many species there are or their relationships to one another, nor is there any authority to identify individual species. The goal of this study is to integrate the information that exists for these taxa (e.g., biochemical, cytological, behavioral) with anatomical (e.g., ostelogical , myological, morphometric) data that will be gathered from adults and developing young in order to (1) identify individual species, (2) determine their interrelationships, (3) describe evolutionary pattern of chromosome, nucleic acids, and morphological features, (4) assess levels of differentiation between sister-species, and (5) combine the various data sets of fossil and Recent organisms to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the group.