ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2021
Rooting the Animal Tree of Life.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- 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
- Article
- The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Evaluating UCE Data Adequacy and Integrating Uncertainty in a Comprehensive Phylogeny of Ants.Systematic biology · 2025Article
- Structural phylogenetics unravels the evolutionary diversification of communication systems in gram-positive bacteria and their viruses.Nature structural & molecular biology · 2025Article
- Sponges, ctenophores, and the statistical significance of syntenies.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Ctenophores and parahoxozoans independently evolved functionally diverse voltage-gated K+ channels.The Journal of general physiology · 2025Article
- Article
- The Buds of Oscarella lobularis (Porifera, Homoscleromorpha): A New Convenient Model for Sponge Cell and Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Journal of experimental zoology. Part B, Molecular and developmental evolution · 2024Article
- A taxon-rich and genome-scale phylogeny of Opisthokonta.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Acoelomorph flatworm monophyly is a long-branch attraction artefact obscuring a clade of Acoela and Xenoturbellida.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A broad survey of choanoflagellates revises the evolutionary history of the Shaker family of voltage-gated KProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Functional analysis of ctenophore Shaker KBiophysical journal · 2024Article
- The origin and evolution of Wnt signalling.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2024Review
- Evolution of glial cells: a non-bilaterian perspective.Neural development · 2024Review
- Is Over-parameterization a Problem for Profile Mixture Models?Systematic biology · 2024Article
- Article
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Identifying our most distant animal relatives has emerged as one of the most challenging problems in phylogenetics. This debate has major implications for our understanding of the origin of multicellular animals and of the earliest events in animal evolution, including the origin of the nervous system. Some analyses identify sponges as our most distant animal relatives (Porifera-sister hypothesis), and others identify comb jellies (Ctenophora-sister hypothesis). These analyses vary in many respects, making it difficult to interpret previous tests of these hypotheses. To gain insight into why different studies yield different results, an important next step in the ongoing debate, we systematically test these hypotheses by synthesizing 15 previous phylogenomic studies and performing new standardized analyses under consistent conditions with additional models. We find that Ctenophora-sister is recovered across the full range of examined conditions, and Porifera-sister is recovered in some analyses under narrow conditions when most outgroups are excluded and site-heterogeneous CAT models are used. We additionally find that the number of categories in site-heterogeneous models is sufficient to explain the Porifera-sister results. Furthermore, our cross-validation analyses show CAT models that recover Porifera-sister have hundreds of additional categories and fail to fit significantly better than site-heterogenuous models with far fewer categories. Systematic and standardized testing of diverse phylogenetic models suggests that we should be skeptical of Porifera-sister results both because they are recovered under such narrow conditions and because the models in these conditions fit the data no better than other models that recover Ctenophora-sister.
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