Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

ANIMAL EVOLUTION

Ctenophore trees

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 1, pages 1600–1601 (2017)Cite this article

Subjects

Comb jellies are remarkably different from other animals. Phylogenetic analyses of broadly sampled ctenophore transcriptome data provide additional evidence that they are the sister group to all other animals and reveal details of their evolutionary relationships to each other.

The first phylogenomic analyses to include ctenophores placed them, instead of sponges, as the sister group to all other animals3. In the ten years since, there has been considerable back and forth, with some studies placing sponges as the sister group to all other animals (the sponge-sister hypothesis; Fig. 2a)4 and others placing ctenophores as the sister group to all other animals (the ctenophore-sister hypothesis; Fig. 2b)5. This growing body of work has shown that the positions of Porifera and Ctenophora can be sensitive to which species are included in the analysis, which genes are sampled and which models of molecular evolution are used. Studies that interpreted results as favouring the sponge-sister hypothesis claimed that a ctenophore-sister outcome is an artefact of long-branch attraction4,6, an error that can be compounded by heterogeneous sequence composition and long unbroken branches. Other studies revealed that the sensitivity is due at least in part to conflicting signals in the data. A recent analysis that examined the relative support of each gene in several datasets found that the ctenophore-sister hypothesis had the highest proportion of supporting genes, with a smaller fraction of sites and genes supporting the sponge-sister hypothesis7. This conflict between genes could be due to a variety of factors, including selection, very short intervals between nodes deep in the phylogeny, or undetected gene duplication and loss.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Fig. 1: The ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi.
Fig. 2: Ctenophores and the animal tree of life.

References

  1. Whelan, N. V. et al. Nat. Ecol. Evol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0331-3 (2017).

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Wallberg, A., Thollesson, M., Farris, J. S. & Jondelius, U. Cladistics 20, 558–578 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Dunn, C. W. et al. Nature 452, 745–749 (2008).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Simion, P. et al. Curr. Biol. 27, 958–967 (2017).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Whelan, N. V., Kocot, K. M., Moroz, L. L. & Halanych, K. M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 5773–5778 (2015).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Pisani, D. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 15402–15407 (2015).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Shen, X.-X., Hittinger, C. T. & Rokas, A. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 1, 0126 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Liebeskind, B. J., Hillis, D. M., Zakon, H. H. & Hofmann, H. A. Trends Ecol. Evol. 31, 127–135 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Dunn, C. W., Leys, S. P. & Haddock, S. H. D. Trends Ecol. Evol. 30, 282–291 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Podar, M., Haddock, S. H., Sogin, M. L. & Harbison, G. R. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 21, 218–230 (2001).

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, 165 Prospect St, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Casey W. Dunn

Authors
  1. Casey W. Dunn
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Casey W. Dunn.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The author declares no competing financial interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Dunn, C.W. Ctenophore trees. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 1600–1601 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0359-4

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0359-4

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing