2009/10/10 by Yunfeng Shan, Shan, Yunfeng, Xiu‐Qing Li +4
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Immunology and Microbiology · #Aquaculture disease management and microbiota #FOS: Biological sciences #Genomics (q-bio.GN) #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms #q-bio.GN #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0910.1949
27 Pages, 2 figures and 3 tables
arxiv created 2009/10/10 · openalex publication_date 2009/10/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Since its discovery of the living fossil in 1938, the coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) has generally been considered to be the closest living relative of the land vertebrates, and this is still the prevailing opinion in most general biology textbooks. However, the origin of tetrapods has been the subject of intense debate for decades. The three principal hypothesis (lungfish-tetrapod, coelacanth-tetrapod, or lungfish-coelacanth sister group) have been proposed. We used the maximum gene-support tree approach to analyze 43 nuclear genes encoding amino acid residues, and compared the results of concatenation and majority-rule tree approaches. The results inferred with three common phylogenetic methods and three genome-scale approaches consistently rejected the hypothesis that the coelacanth is the closest living relative of tetrapods.