ArticleNature communications2021
Evidence for sponges as sister to all other animals from partitioned phylogenomics with mixture models and recoding.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 61 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Rethinking Plasticity in Sponges.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2026Pooled it
- Sex Determination in Sponges.Molecular reproduction and development · 2026Review
- Evolutionary trajectories, early diversification, and species-specific amplification of the metazoan inhibitor of apoptosis (IAP) repertoire.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- IQ-TREE 3: phylogenomic inference software using complex evolutionary models.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The 3D architecture of the ctenophore aboral organ and the evolution of complex integrative centers in animals.Science advances · 2026Article
- Reassessing viral origins and evolutionary placement in the tree of life.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2026Review
- Article
- Oxygen regulation in the earliest animals: spatiotemporal resolution of oxygen dynamics in single-osculumFrontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- Why Homoscleromorph Sponges Have Ciliated Epithelia: Evidence for an Ancestral Role in Mucociliary Driven Particle Flux.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2025Article
- Evolution of the Metazoan Protein Domain Repertoire Revealed by a Birth-Death-Gain Model.Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Article
- Beyond synapses: cytoplasmic connections in brain function and evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Roots and early routes of neuroendocrinology.Cell and tissue research · 2025Review
- Phosphatic stromatoporoid sponges formed reefs ~480 Mya.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The architecture of sponge choanocyte chambers is well adapted to mechanical pumping functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- MixtureFinder: Estimating DNA Mixture Models for Phylogenetic Analyses.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Acoelomorph flatworm monophyly is a long-branch attraction artefact obscuring a clade of Acoela and Xenoturbellida.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Transcriptomic responses of Mediterranean sponges upon encounter with symbiont microbial consortia.BMC genomics · 2024Article
- Discovering Fragile Clades and Causal Sequences in Phylogenomics by Evolutionary Sparse Learning.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Resolving the relationships between the major lineages in the animal tree of life is necessary to understand the origin and evolution of key animal traits. Sponges, characterized by their simple body plan, were traditionally considered the sister group of all other animal lineages, implying a gradual increase in animal complexity from unicellularity to complex multicellularity. However, the availability of genomic data has sparked tremendous controversy as some phylogenomic studies support comb jellies taking this position, requiring secondary loss or independent origins of complex traits. Here we show that incorporating site-heterogeneous mixture models and recoding into partitioned phylogenomics alleviates systematic errors that hamper commonly-applied phylogenetic models. Testing on real datasets, we show a great improvement in model-fit that attenuates branching artefacts induced by systematic error. We reanalyse key datasets and show that partitioned phylogenomics does not support comb jellies as sister to other animals at either the supermatrix or partition-specific level.
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