Comments on: Lizard mitochondria converge on snakes–why? http://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/blog/2009/06/30/lizards-converge-on-snakes-why/ About DNA barcoding Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:28:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2 By: David Pollock http://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/blog/2009/06/30/lizards-converge-on-snakes-why/comment-page-1/#comment-100972 David Pollock Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:47:22 +0000 http://phe.rockefeller.edu/barcode/blog/?p=2112#comment-100972 Mark, Thanks for the note and the writeup. It is great to get thoughtful feedback! We definitely agree that more agamid mito genomes are highly motivated. Indications from our study were that a lot of convergent changes were ancestral to the two we looked at, but that some were on the terminal lineages. Parsing it out onto shorter branches would be great. If you (or anyone reading this) hear of any progress on this front, we would be grateful to know about it. The BOLD data would be good to look at as well, although it will be harder to know for sure if there are inconsistent phylogenies just within the COI fragment. Horizontal gene transfer was considered and ruled out as a mechanism for the data that we observed, by the way (the majority of sites in the mitochondrial genomes support the nuclear tree; only a small proportion of sites are responsible for disrupting the overall phylogeny), although obviously it is a mechanism that ought to be considered in any new case. Cheers, David Mark,

Thanks for the note and the writeup. It is great to get thoughtful feedback!

We definitely agree that more agamid mito genomes are highly motivated. Indications from our study were that a lot of convergent changes were ancestral to the two we looked at, but that some were on the terminal lineages. Parsing it out onto shorter branches would be great. If you (or anyone reading this) hear of any progress on this front, we would be grateful to know about it. The BOLD data would be good to look at as well, although it will be harder to know for sure if there are inconsistent phylogenies just within the COI fragment. Horizontal gene transfer was considered and ruled out as a mechanism for the data that we observed, by the way (the majority of sites in the mitochondrial genomes support the nuclear tree; only a small proportion of sites are responsible for disrupting the overall phylogeny), although obviously it is a mechanism that ought to be considered in any new case.

Cheers,

David

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