Publication Date:
2016-02-06
Description:
The position of Xenacoelomorpha in the tree of life remains a major unresolved question in the study of deep animal relationships. Xenacoelomorpha, comprising Acoela, Nemertodermatida, and Xenoturbella, are bilaterally symmetrical marine worms that lack several features common to most other bilaterians, for example an anus, nephridia, and a circulatory system. Two conflicting hypotheses are under debate: Xenacoelomorpha is the sister group to all remaining Bilateria (= Nephrozoa, namely protostomes and deuterostomes) or is a clade inside Deuterostomia. Thus, determining the phylogenetic position of this clade is pivotal for understanding the early evolution of bilaterian features, or as a case of drastic secondary loss of complexity. Here we show robust phylogenomic support for Xenacoelomorpha as the sister taxon of Nephrozoa. Our phylogenetic analyses, based on 11 novel xenacoelomorph transcriptomes and using different models of evolution under maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference analyses, strongly corroborate this result. Rigorous testing of 25 experimental data sets designed to exclude data partitions and taxa potentially prone to reconstruction biases indicates that long-branch attraction, saturation, and missing data do not influence these results. The sister group relationship between Nephrozoa and Xenacoelomorpha supported by our phylogenomic analyses implies that the last common ancestor of bilaterians was probably a benthic, ciliated acoelomate worm with a single opening into an epithelial gut, and that excretory organs, coelomic cavities, and nerve cords evolved after xenacoelomorphs separated from the stem lineage of Nephrozoa.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Cannon, Johanna Taylor -- Vellutini, Bruno Cossermelli -- Smith, Julian 3rd -- Ronquist, Fredrik -- Jondelius, Ulf -- Hejnol, Andreas -- England -- Nature. 2016 Feb 4;530(7588):89-93. doi: 10.1038/nature16520.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, PO Box 50007, SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden. ; Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology, University of Bergen, Thormohlensgate 55, 5008 Bergen, Norway. ; Department of Biology, Winthrop University, 701 Oakland Avenue, Rock Hill, South Carolina 29733, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26842059" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animal Structures/anatomy & histology
;
Animals
;
Aquatic Organisms/*classification/genetics
;
Bayes Theorem
;
Genes
;
Likelihood Functions
;
Male
;
Models, Biological
;
*Phylogeny
;
Transcriptome
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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