Dissertation Research: Molecular Systematic Studies of the Placement of Carnivora Within Eutherian Mammals

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study proposes to examine the placement of the order Carnivora as well as several other groups, among the eighteen extant orders of eutherian mammals. DNA sequence data will be gathered from four different loci: Cytochrome B, Ubiquitin, Histone H3, and the oncogene K-ras. The use of nucleotide sequence data from several different loci, rather than all the sequence of one large gene, yields comparisons of codon bias, rate of evolution, and retention of phylogenetic signal between genes as well as avoiding the evolutionary, peculiarities of any one locus. Each order will be represented by at least two taxa, which will be chosen to be as diverse as possible based on prior systematic analyses. A parsimony approach combined with down- weighting of saturated sites will be used to analyze the data. Additionally, molecular information will be combined with the pertinent morphological data in a separate analysis. This combination of phylogenetic sampling, use of multiple loci, and total information analysis makes it likely that the so far equivocal information on relationships of many of the mammalian orders will be better understood and that current theories of mammalian molecular evolution will be better tested and expanded.