ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Error, signal, and the placement of Ctenophora sister to all other animals.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 142 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
142 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 348 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Biomechanical analyses point to dense collagen fibre architecture in an Ediacaran frond.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Conditional Senescence and Longevity Mechanisms in Early-Branching Metazoans: Insights fromCurrent issues in molecular biology · 2026Article
- Phylogenomic mixture models outperform homogeneous and partitioned models.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Toward a genomic understanding of the tree of life.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Neural connectome of the ctenophore statocyst.eLife · 2026Article
- Neurite branching is associated with mixed microtubule polarity in sea anemone neurons.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Ctenophores and parahoxozoans independently evolved functionally diverse voltage-gated K+ channels.The Journal of general physiology · 2025Article
- Roots and early routes of neuroendocrinology.Cell and tissue research · 2025Review
- The Chromosome-level Genome of the Ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi A. Agassiz, 1865 Reveals a Unique Immune Gene Repertoire.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Saltational Episodes of Reticulate Evolution in the Drosophila saltans Species Group.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Making Neurobots and Chimerical Ctenophores.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A taxon-rich and genome-scale phylogeny of Opisthokonta.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Highly conserved and extremely evolvable: BMP signalling in secondary axis patterning of Cnidaria and Bilateria.Development genes and evolution · 2024Review
- The promise and pitfalls of synteny in phylogenomics.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Silica-associated proteins from hexactinellid sponges support an alternative evolutionary scenario for biomineralization in Porifera.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Gap Junctions in Ctenophora.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
- Parallel Evolution of Transcription Factors in Basal Metazoans.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2024Article
82 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Elucidating relationships among early animal lineages has been difficult, and recent phylogenomic analyses place Ctenophora sister to all other extant animals, contrary to the traditional view of Porifera as the earliest-branching animal lineage. To date, phylogenetic support for either ctenophores or sponges as sister to other animals has been limited and inconsistent among studies. Lack of agreement among phylogenomic analyses using different data and methods obscures how complex traits, such as epithelia, neurons, and muscles evolved. A consensus view of animal evolution will not be accepted until datasets and methods converge on a single hypothesis of early metazoan relationships and putative sources of systematic error (e.g., long-branch attraction, compositional bias, poor model choice) are assessed. Here, we investigate possible causes of systematic error by expanding taxon sampling with eight novel transcriptomes, strictly enforcing orthology inference criteria, and progressively examining potential causes of systematic error while using both maximum-likelihood with robust data partitioning and Bayesian inference with a site-heterogeneous model. We identified ribosomal protein genes as possessing a conflicting signal compared with other genes, which caused some past studies to infer ctenophores and cnidarians as sister. Importantly, biases resulting from elevated compositional heterogeneity or elevated substitution rates are ruled out. Placement of ctenophores as sister to all other animals, and sponge monophyly, are strongly supported under multiple analyses, herein.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.