In highly conserved widely distributed ortholog groups, the main evolutionary force is assumed to be purifying selection that enforces sequence conservation, with most divergence occurring by accumulation of neutral substitutions.
In the most dramatic divergence of opinion ever heard on the Spotlight, beabetterbooktalker.com's Andrea Lipinski joins Cinefantastique Online's Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and myself to debate what Hood and team have gotten right in this big-budget adaptation, and where they've faltered.
The demographic modeling in the current study indicates most recent divergence of the Druze from an ancestral population shared with Egyptians, Ashkenazi Jews, Adygeis and Greeks (Figure 2).
The Chlorokybus + Mesostigma clade was identified as the most basal divergence of the Streptophyta and the monophyly of all chlorophytes, except Nephroselmis, was observed.
Our mitogenomic tree (Fig. 3) was consistent with other molecular studies [ 14, 46] with respect to the most basal divergence of genus Brookesia and the subsequent divergence of the Rhampholeon + Rieppeleon group.
In the alternative T2 topology, the Chlorokybus + Mesostigma clade was identified as the first branch of the Streptophyta, whereas in the alternative T3 topology, it represented the most basal divergence of the Chlorophyta.
Only the most recent divergence of core trebouxiophycean lineages we identified (i.e. the Choricystis/ Elliptochloris + Watanabea assemblage) was also recivered in 18S rDNA studies [ 32, 72], but with no support.
The debate on the taxon-dense versus character-rich approaches has focused on three high profile cases of chloroplast phylogenomic studies: the earliest angiosperms [ 14, 34, 56- 59], the deepest branch of the land plants [ 33, 60, 61] and the most basal divergence of the Viridiplantae/Streptophyta [ 4, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17].
The Prasinophyceae represent the most basal divergence of the Chlorophyta [ 10, 11] and, although the branching order of the Ulvophyceae, Trebouxiophyceae and Chlorophyceae (UTC) remains uncertain [ 12], chloroplast and mitochondrial genome data suggest that the Trebouxiophyceae emerged before the Ulvophyceae and Chlorophyceae [ 13- 15].
We conducted Bayesian analyses using combined mitochondrial gene sequences that were used by Raxworthy et al. [ 14] and Townsend and Larson [ 15] and the results (data not shown) also supported the most basal divergence of Brookesia as shown in Townsend et al. [ 51].
