ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
MicroRNAs and phylogenomics resolve the relationships of Tardigrada and suggest that velvet worms are the sister group of Arthropoda.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 papers.
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92 citing papers in PubMed, 233 citations in OpenAlex.
- The timescale of nematode evolution reveals late and convergent radiations of parasitism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- At the Edge of Survival: Exploring the Frontiers of Tardigrade Extreme Stress Tolerance.Molecular ecology · 2026Review
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- CircRNAs Regulate Senescence-Associated miRNAs in Gastric Cancer.Current cancer drug targets · 2026Review
- Lnc-HZ05 Suppresses Trophoblast Cell Migrasome Formation by Disrupting TGFβ2 Pathway in Unexplained Recurrent Miscarriage.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- How to Live in the Moment: The Methodology and Limitations of Evolutionary Research on Consciousness.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Preservation and early evolution of scalidophoran ventral nerve cord.Science advances · 2025Article
- CAT-Posterior Mean Site Frequencies Improves Phylogenetic Modeling Under Maximum Likelihood and Resolves Tardigrada as the Sister of Arthropoda Plus Onychophora.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Storage cell proliferation during somatic growth establishes that tardigrades are not eutelic organisms.Biology open · 2024Article
- Phylogenomics of weevils revisited: data curation and modelling compositional heterogeneity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Comparative evolutionary analyses of eight whitefly Bemisia tabaci sensu lato genomes: cryptic species, agricultural pests and plant-virus vectors.BMC genomics · 2023Article
- The unbearable uncertainty of panarthropod relationships.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Exploring genome gene content and morphological analysis to test recalcitrant nodes in the animal phylogeny.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Evolutionary History of TOPIIA Topoisomerases in Animals.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
- Serial Homology and Segment Identity in the Arthropod Head.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- Extensive loss of Wnt genes in Tardigrada.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Large-Scale Annotation and Evolution Analysis of MiRNA in Insects.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Phylogeography and morphological evolution of Pseudechiniscus (Heterotardigrada: Echiniscidae).Scientific reports · 2021Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 6 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Morphological data traditionally group Tardigrada (water bears), Onychophora (velvet worms), and Arthropoda (e.g., spiders, insects, and their allies) into a monophyletic group of invertebrates with walking appendages known as the Panarthropoda. However, molecular data generally do not support the inclusion of tardigrades within the Panarthropoda, but instead place them closer to Nematoda (roundworms). Here we present results from the analyses of two independent genomic datasets, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), which congruently resolve the phylogenetic relationships of Tardigrada. Our EST analyses, based on 49,023 amino acid sites from 255 proteins, significantly support a monophyletic Panarthropoda including Tardigrada and suggest a sister group relationship between Arthropoda and Onychophora. Using careful experimental manipulations--comparisons of model fit, signal dissection, and taxonomic pruning--we show that support for a Tardigrada + Nematoda group derives from the phylogenetic artifact of long-branch attraction. Our small RNA libraries fully support our EST results; no miRNAs were found to link Tardigrada and Nematoda, whereas all panarthropods were found to share one unique miRNA (miR-276). In addition, Onychophora and Arthropoda were found to share a second miRNA (miR-305). Our study confirms the monophyly of the legged ecdysozoans, shows that past support for a Tardigrada + Nematoda group was due to long-branch attraction, and suggests that the velvet worms are the sister group to the arthropods.
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