Avian Ordinal Phylogeny Based on Mitochondrial DNA Sequences

小行星9726427 鸟类是人类重要的食物，娱乐，作为环境健康的指标，并作为应用和基础研究的实验模型。 尽管它们的重要性，它们的系谱（进化）关系仍然知之甚少，限制了我们理解鸟类之间分子，形态和行为差异的进化过程的能力。 我们对鸟类序数关系的了解有限的原因之一是它们明显的快速多样化，大多数物种在相对较短的时间内出现。 要解析快速辐射物种的系谱，需要大量物种的特征集，目前还没有这样的数据集。 在这项研究中，大卫明德尔和迈克尔索伦森将推断134种鸟类之间的系谱关系，包括所有公认的鸟类目的代表，使用来自每个物种的3个蛋白质编码基因，1个核糖体基因和9个转移RNA基因的5,000个碱基对的线粒体DNA序列。 他们将评估鸟类之间DNA序列进化速率差异的潜在原因，并确定如何改进对这些原因的了解，以提高基因学估计过程的效率和准确性，并将尝试估计各种鸟类的年龄。

9726427 Mindell Birds are important to humans for food, for recreation, as indicators of environmental health, and as experimental models in applied and basic research. Despite their importance, their genealogical (evolutionary) relationships remain poorly known, restricting our ability to understand the evolutionary processes giving rise to the molecular, morphological and behavioral differences among orders of birds. One of the reasons for our limited knowledge of avian ordinal relationships is their apparent rapid diversification, with most species arising during a relatively short time-span. Resolving genealogy for rapid radiations of species such as this requires large sets of characters for numerous species, and no such data sets are currently available. In this research, David Mindell and Michael Sorenson will infer the genealogical relationships among 134 birds, including representatives of all commonly recognized avian orders, using 5,000 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA sequence from 3 protein-coding genes, 1 ribosomal gene, and 9 transfer RNA genes for each species. They will assess potential causes for differences among birds in rates of DNA sequence evolution and determine how improved knowledge of these causes may improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process of geneaology estimation , and will attempt to estimate the ages of various orders and lineages of birds.