CiteULike CiteULike
Delicious Delicious
Connotea Connotea

Citation for Study 21001

About Citation title: "When Homoplasy is not Homoplasy: Dissecting Trait Evolution by Contrasting Composite and Reductive Coding".
About Study name: "When Homoplasy is not Homoplasy: Dissecting Trait Evolution by Contrasting Composite and Reductive Coding".
About This study is part of submission 21001 (Status: Published).

Citation

Torres-montufar A., Borsch T., & Ochoterena H. 2017. When Homoplasy is not Homoplasy: Dissecting Trait Evolution by Contrasting Composite and Reductive Coding. Systematic Biology, .

Authors

  • Torres-montufar A. (submitter) Phone 65472721
  • Borsch T.
  • Ochoterena H. Phone 56229122

Abstract

The conceptualization and coding of characters is a difficult issue in phylogenetic systematics, no matter which inference method is used when reconstructing phylogenetic trees or if the characters are just mapped onto a specific tree. Complex characters are groups of features that can be divided into simpler hierarchical characters (reductive coding), although the implied hierarchical relational information may change depending on the type of coding (composite vs reductive). Up to now, there is no common agreement to either code characters as complex or simple. Phylogeneticists have discussed which coding method is best, but have not incorporated the heuristic process of reciprocal illumination to evaluate the coding. Composite coding allows to test 1) if several characters were linked resulting in a structure described as a complex character or trait, or 2) if independently evolving characters resulted in the configuration incorrectly interpreted as a complex character. We propose that complex characters or character states should be decomposed iteratively into simpler characters when the original homology hypothesis is not corroborated by a phylogenetic analysis, and the character or character state is retrieved as homoplastic. We tested this approach using the case of fruit types within subfamily Cinchonoideae (Rubiaceae). The iterative reductive coding of characters associated to drupes allowed us to unthread fruit evolution within Cinchonoideae. Our results show that drupes and berries are not homologous. As a consequence, a more precise ontology for the Cinchonoideae drupes is required.

Keywords

Character evolution, Complex characters, Simple characters, Rubiaceae, Fruit evolution, Drupes, Homoplasy

External links

About this resource

  • Canonical resource URI: http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S21001
  • Other versions: Download Reconstructed NEXUS File Nexus Download NeXML File NeXML
  • Show BibTeX reference
  • Show RIS reference