Avian Ordinal Phylogeny Based on Mitochondrial DNA Sequences

9726427 Mindell鸟对人类来说是重要的食物、娱乐、环境健康指标以及应用和基础研究的实验模型。尽管它们很重要，但它们的谱系(进化)关系仍然鲜为人知，限制了我们理解导致鸟类目之间分子、形态和行为差异的进化过程的能力。我们对鸟类序贯关系了解有限的原因之一是它们明显的迅速多样化，大多数物种出现在相对较短的时间跨度内。像这样快速辐射物种的系谱解析需要大量物种的大字符集，而目前还没有这样的数据集。在这项研究中，David Mindell和Michael Sorenson将利用来自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个碱基对的线粒体DNA序列，推断134只鸟类的系谱关系，其中包括所有公认的鸟类目的代表。他们将评估鸟类在DNA序列进化速度上存在差异的潜在原因，并确定对这些原因的了解如何改进遗传学估计过程的效率和准确性，并将尝试估计鸟类不同目和谱系的年龄。

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.