Colorful seashells: Identification of haem pathway genes associated with the synthesis of porphyrin shell color in marine snails.

Very little is known about the evolution of molluskan shell pigments, although Mollusca is a highly diverse, species rich, and ecologically important group of animals comprised of many brightly colored taxa. The marine snail genus was chosen as an exceptional model for studying the evolution of shell color, first, because in and both shell and foot share similar colors and patterns; and second, because recent studies have identified the pigments, trochopuniceus (pink-red), and trochoxouthos (yellow-brown), both comprised of uroporphyrin I and uroporphyrin III, in both shell and colored foot tissue of these species. These unusual characteristics provide a rare opportunity to identify the genes involved in color production because, as the same pigments occur in the shell and colored foot tissue, the same color-related genes may be simultaneously expressed in both mantle (which produces the shell) and foot tissue.

Evolutionary history of a vanishing radiation: isolation-dependent persistence and diversification in Pacific Island partulid tree snails.

Background: Partulid tree snails are endemic to Pacific high islands and have experienced extraordinary rates of extinction in recent decades. Although they collectively range across a 10,000 km swath of Oceania, half of the family's total species diversity is endemic to a single Eastern Pacific hot spot archipelago (the Society Islands) and all three partulid genera display highly distinctive distributions. Our goal was to investigate broad scale (range wide) and fine scale (within-Society Islands) molecular phylogenetic relationships of the two widespread genera, Partula and Samoana.

Osiris: accessible and reproducible phylogenetic and phylogenomic analyses within the Galaxy workflow management system.

Background: Phylogenetic tools and 'tree-thinking' approaches increasingly permeate all biological research. At the same time, phylogenetic data sets are expanding at breakneck pace, facilitated by increasingly economical sequencing technologies. Therefore, there is an urgent need for accessible, modular, and sharable tools for phylogenetic analysis.

Two new sympatric species of Eusarsiella (Ostracoda: Myodocopida: Sarsiellidae) from the Florida Keys with a morphological phylogeny of Sarsiellinae.

We describe two new sympatric species of Sarsiellidae from coastal Florida, USA: Eusarsiella bryanjuarezi sp. nov. and Eusarsiella eli sp.

Parallel changes in genital morphology delineate cryptic diversification of planktonic nudibranchs.

The relative roles of geographical and non-geographical barriers in the genesis of genetic isolation are highly debated in evolutionary biology, yet knowing how speciation occurs is essential to our understanding of biodiversity. In the open ocean, differentiating between the two is particularly difficult, because of the high levels of gene flow found in pelagic communities. Here, we use molecular phylogenetics to test the hypothesis that geography is the primary isolating mechanism in a clade of pelagic nudibranchs, Glaucinae.