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Citation for Study 10113

About Citation title: "Deciphering and dating the red panda?s ancestry and early adaptive radiation of Musteloidea".
About This study was previously identified under the legacy study ID S2454 (Status: Published).

Citation

Sato J., Wolsan M., Minami S., Hosoda T., Shinaga M., Hiyama K., Yamaguchi Y., & Suzuki H. 2009. Deciphering and dating the red panda?s ancestry and early adaptive radiation of Musteloidea. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 53(3): 907-922.

Authors

  • Sato J.
  • Wolsan M.
  • Minami S.
  • Hosoda T.
  • Shinaga M.
  • Hiyama K.
  • Yamaguchi Y.
  • Suzuki H.

Abstract

Few species have been of more disputed affinities than giant (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) and the red or lesser (Ailurus fulgens) pandas, peculiar endemic Southeast Asian vegetarian members of the placental mammalian order Carnivora. Whereas the bear nature of giant panda has ultimately been demonstrated convincingly based on both morphologic and genetic grounds, the phylogenetic position of the red panda has remained elusive despite numerous attempts and a variety of data classes analyzed. We examined the relationship of the red panda to other carnivorans using a set of concatenated ~5.5-kb sequences from protein-coding exons of five nuclear genes (APOB, BRCA1, RAG1, RBP3 [IRBP], and VWF). Bayesian, maximum likelihood, and parsimony analyses resulted in almost identical phylogenetic reconstructions. The red panda was robustly supported as the closest living relative of a clade containing raccoons (family Procyonidae) and weasels, otters, martens, badgers, and allies (family Mustelidae), with the clade of skunks and stink badgers (family Mephitidae) as having diverged more basally. The three families together with the red panda (which is classified here as a single extant species of a distinct family, Ailuridae) compose the superfamily Musteloidea, a clade strongly supported as the sister taxon to the monophyletic Pinnipedia (seals, sea lions, walruses). The approximately unbiased, Kishino-Hasegawa, and Templeton topology tests significantly rejected alternative hypotheses about the red panda fs relationships within Musteloidea. Our finding is the first conclusive resolution of the red panda fs phylogenetic position, a solution to an evolutionary riddle that has persisted for almost two centuries. Our result shows that at ~28 to 35 Myr-old levels of phylogenetic divergence (which correspond to an estimated interval for the origin of all extant musteloid families), nuclear DNA sequences (when combined from multiple genes) can be more informative and effective than mitochondrial sequences in resolving relationships.

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  • Canonical resource URI: http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S10113
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