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Development and application of a phylogenomic toolkit: Resolving the evolutionary history of Madagascar’s lemurs

¹ Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA; ² Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA; ³ National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina 27705, USA; ⁴ Department of Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, German Primate Centre, Göttingen 37077, Germany; ⁵ Department of Molecular Genetics, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA; ⁶ Duke Lemur Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27705, USA

Lemurs and the other strepsirrhine primates are of great interest to the primate genomics community due to their phylogenetic placement as the sister lineage to all other primates. Previous attempts to resolve the phylogeny of lemurs employed limited mitochondrial or small nuclear data sets, with many relationships poorly supported or entirely unresolved. We used genomic resources to develop 11 novel markers from nine chromosomes, representing 9 kb of nuclear sequence data. In combination with previously published nuclear and mitochondrial loci, this yields a data set of more than 16 kb and adds 275 kb of DNA sequence to current databases. Our phylogenetic analyses confirm hypotheses of lemuriform monophyly and provide robust resolution of the phylogenetic relationships among the five lemuriform families. We verify that the genus Daubentonia is the sister lineage to all other lemurs. The Cheirogaleidae and Lepilemuridae are sister taxa and together form the sister lineage to the Indriidae; this clade is the sister lineage to the Lemuridae. Divergence time estimates indicate that lemurs are an ancient group, with their initial diversification occurring around the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Given the power of this data set to resolve branches in a notoriously problematic area of primate phylogeny, we anticipate that our phylogenomic toolkit will be of value to other studies of primate phylogeny and diversification. Moreover, the methods applied will be broadly applicable to other taxonomic groups where phylogenetic relationships have been notoriously difficult to resolve.

E-mail juliann.horvath{at}duke.edu; fax (919) 668-0795.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org. The sequence data from this study have been submitted to GenBank under accession nos. EU057196–EU057514 and EU342218–EU342345.]

Article published online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.7265208

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