Species tree inference in a recent radiation of orioles (Genus Icterus): Multiple markers and methods reveal cytonuclear discordance in the northern oriole group
No Thumbnail Available
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2011-06-26
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Frode Jacobsen, Kevin E. Omland, Species tree inference in a recent radiation of orioles (Genus Icterus): Multiple markers and methods reveal cytonuclear discordance in the northern oriole groupMolecular Phylogenetics and Evolution Volume 61, Issue 2, November 2011, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2011.06.017
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Abstract
Recent computational advances provide novel opportunities to infer species trees based on multiple independent loci. Thus, single gene trees no longer need suffice as proxies for species phylogenies. Several methods have been developed to deal with the challenges posed by incomplete and stochastic lineage sorting. In this study, we employed four Bayesian methods to infer the phylogeny of a clade of 11 recently diverged oriole species within the genus Icterus. We obtained well-resolved and mostly congruent phylogenies using a set of seven unlinked nuclear intron loci and sampling multiple individuals per species. Most notably, Bayesian concordance analysis generally agreed well with concatenation; the two methods agreed fully on eight of nine nodes. The coalescent-based method ∗BEAST further supported six of these eight nodes. The fourth method used, BEST, failed to converge despite exhaustive efforts to optimize the tree search. Overall, the results obtained by new species tree methods and concatenation generally corroborate our findings from previous analyses and data sets. However, we found striking disagreement between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA involving relationships within the northern oriole group. Our results highlight the danger of reliance on mtDNA alone for phylogenetic inference. We demonstrate that in spite of low variability and incomplete lineage sorting, multiple nuclear loci can produce largely congruent phylogenies based on multiple species tree methods, even for very closely-related species.