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Placozoa and Cnidaria are sister taxa

View ORCID ProfileChristopher E. Laumer, Harald Gruber-Vodicka, Michael G. Hadfield, Vicki B. Pearse, Ana Riesgo, John C. Marioni, Gonzalo Giribet
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/200972
Christopher E. Laumer
1Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, United Kingdom
2European Molecular Biology Laboratories-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom
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  • ORCID record for Christopher E. Laumer
  • For correspondence: claumer@ebi.ac.uk
Harald Gruber-Vodicka
3Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Celsiusstraβe 1, D-28359 Bremen, Germany
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Michael G. Hadfield
4Kewalo Marine Laboratory, Pacific Biosciences Research Center/University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 41 Ahui Street, Honolulu, HI 96813, United States of America
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Vicki B. Pearse
5University of California, Santa Cruz, Institute of Marine Sciences, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, United States of America
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Ana Riesgo
6The Natural History Museum, Life Sciences, Invertebrate Division Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom
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John C. Marioni
1Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, CB10 1SA, United Kingdom
2European Molecular Biology Laboratories-European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom
7Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, Li Ka Shing Centre, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0RE, United Kingdom
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Gonzalo Giribet
8Museum of Comparative Zoology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States of America
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Abstract

The phylogenetic placement of the morphologically simple placozoans is crucial to understanding the evolution of complex animal traits. Here, we examine the influence of adding new genomes from placozoans to a large dataset designed to study the deepest splits in the animal phylogeny. Using site-heterogeneous substitution models, we show that it is possible to obtain strong support, in both amino acid and reduced-alphabet matrices, for either a sister-group relationship between Cnidaria and Placozoa, or for Cnidaria and Bilateria (=Planulozoa), also seen in most published work to date, depending on the orthologues selected to construct the matrix. We demonstrate that a majority of genes show evidence of compositional heterogeneity, and that the support for Planulozoa can be assigned to this source of systematic error. In interpreting this placozoan-cnidarian clade, we caution against a peremptory reading of placozoans as secondarily reduced forms of little relevance to broader discussions of early animal evolution.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 17, 2018.
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Placozoa and Cnidaria are sister taxa
Christopher E. Laumer, Harald Gruber-Vodicka, Michael G. Hadfield, Vicki B. Pearse, Ana Riesgo, John C. Marioni, Gonzalo Giribet
bioRxiv 200972; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/200972
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Placozoa and Cnidaria are sister taxa
Christopher E. Laumer, Harald Gruber-Vodicka, Michael G. Hadfield, Vicki B. Pearse, Ana Riesgo, John C. Marioni, Gonzalo Giribet
bioRxiv 200972; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/200972

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