Avian Ordinal Phylogeny Based on Mitochondrial DNA Sequences

9726427米德尔鸟对人类的食物、娱乐、环境健康指标以及应用和基础研究中的实验模型都很重要。尽管它们很重要，但它们的谱系（进化）关系仍然鲜为人知，这限制了我们理解鸟类不同目之间分子、形态和行为差异的进化过程的能力。我们对鸟类有序关系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跨度内出现。像这样解决物种快速辐射的谱系问题需要大量的物种特征集，而目前还没有这样的数据集。在这项研究中，David Mindell和Michael Sorenson将利用每个物种的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5000个碱基对线粒体DNA序列，推断出134种鸟类的谱系关系，包括所有常见鸟类目的代表。他们将评估鸟类之间DNA序列进化速率差异的潜在原因，并确定对这些原因的进一步了解如何提高家谱估计过程的效率和准确性，并将尝试估计鸟类各种目和谱系的年龄。

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.