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

拟议的研究项目旨在恢复Silurana属和Xenopus属的笛蛙及其化石近亲的历史关系。虽然这些属的活着的青蛙只知道来自撒哈拉以南的非洲，但化石(可以追溯到上白垩纪)出现在非洲和南美洲，从而表明这些现代物种和化石物种的祖先在分裂之前可能已经在这些大陆上广泛分布。Silurana和Xenopus长期以来一直是生物和生物医学研究(如发育和遗传研究、免疫生物学、基因图谱等)的主题，但我们不知道有多少物种或它们彼此之间的关系，也没有任何确定单个物种的权威。这项研究的目的是将这些分类群的现有信息(例如生化、细胞学、行为学)与从成年和发育中的幼年生物收集的解剖学(例如骨质学、肌学、形态计量学)数据相结合，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，以及(5)结合化石和现代生物的各种数据集，以重建该群体的进化历史。

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.