What is Protacanthopterygii? A phylogenomic perspective of early-branching lineages of euteleost fishes
Open AccessRecent initiatives to resolve the phylogenetic tree of bony fishes have produced many new insights and increased our knowledge significantly owing to analysis of molecular genetic data. We are still far, however, from having a fully resolved phylogenetic tree. Some inconsistencies are still present among higher-level early-branching euteleost lineages (orders and supraordinal groups), including the definition of the supraordinal taxon Protacanthopterygii. Since the creation of this group by Greenwood et al. (1966) to contain several taxa considered “precursors” of acanthopterygians 54 years ago, at least 13 different changes were proposed for its membership and interrelationships. While what we know about Protacanthopterygii has been based on morphological or molecular approaches, most studies have not dealt adequately with both, comprehensive species coverage and genome-wide genetic sampling. To address this issue, a database of over 1133 new exon sequences was generated using target-capture and Illumina sequencing for 123 species involving the following orders (number of species sampled for each order in parenthesis): Argentiniformes (16), Galaxiiformes (4), Salmoniformes (24), Esociformes (3), Stomiatiformes (43), Osmeriformes (9), and Lepidogalaxiformes (1), plus outgroups (23). Bioinformatics resources also were developed to perform meticulous quality-control and extensive phylogenetic analyses including accounting for gene-tree estimation error as well as tests for alternative hypotheses using gene-genealogy interrogation (GGI) with approximately unbiased (AU) tests. Results from these analyses did not support the monophyletic nature of Protacanthopterygii and identified the order Galaxiiformes as the sister group to Neoteleostei and calls into question the need to recognize Protacanthopterygii as a natural group. This study provides a user-friendly toolkit for future phyloinformatics analyses and the most comprehensive hypothesis based on detailed genome-level analysis to date to understand early diverging events among euteleost fishes.
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RosasPuchuri_gwu_0075M_15725.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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