Mitochondrial and Nuclear Allele Phylogenies in Rapidly Speciating Sea Urchins

在过去的50年里，关于物种如何在陆地栖息地形成的见解和直觉并不经常适用于海洋中的物种形成。两种新的生物工具将用于海洋物种形成的研究，以了解世界上最多样化的海洋栖息地：印度-西太平洋的生物多样性。生物技术的最新进展使四种热带海胆的细胞核和线粒体基因组的DNA片段得以测序。先前的结果表明，这些物种是已知的最接近的海胆物种，而新的序列数据将显示遗传差异是如何在新物种分化的早期出现的。数据分析将利用强调DNA序列系谱树的最新技术。对不同类型DNA片段的平行分析将提供一个独特的信息体来解释该群体中围绕物种形成的进化事件。研究结果将推广到其他群体，并使人们了解热带海洋中大量共存物种的出现和维持的方式和原因。

The insight and intuition developed over the past 50 years about how species form in terrestrial habitats does not apply often to speciation in the sea. Two new biological tools will be used in the study of marine speciation in order to understand biodiversity in the world's most diverse marine habitat: the Indo-West Pacific. Recent advances in biotechnology allow DNA segments from the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of four species of tropical sea urchins to be sequenced. Previous results show that these species are the most closely related urchin species known, and new sequence data will show how genetic distinctions arise early in the divergence of new species. The data analysis will take advantage of recent techniques that emphasize the genealogical trees of DNA sequences. The parallel analysis of different types of DNA segments will provide a unique body of information explaining the evolutionary events surrounding speciation in the group. The results will be generalizable to other groups, and allow an understanding of how and why the large number of co- occurring species in the tropical oceans has arisen and is maintained.