Molecular phylogeny and biogeography of the land snail family Hygromiidae (Gastropoda: Helicoidea).

The Hygromiidae is a highly diverse group of land snails with a distribution range stretching throughout the Palearctic region from the Macaronesian Islands to the Russian Far East and reaching southwards to the north-eastern Ethiopian region. So far, the classification of the family largely rested on the structure of the dart apparatus, an accessory genital organ. We used nuclear and mitochondrial DNA sequences of almost all genera to reconstruct the phylogeny of the Hygromiidae.

Species limits, interspecific hybridization and phylogeny in the cryptic land snail complex Pyramidula: The power of RADseq data.

Restriction site-associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) was used to jointly assess phylogenetic relationships, interspecific hybridization and species delimitation in the cryptic, non-model land snail complex Pyramidula. A robust phylogeny was inferred using a matrix of concatenated sequences of almost 1,500,000bp long, containing >97,000 polymorphic sites. Maximum likelihood analyses fully resolved the phylogenetic relationships among species and drastically improved phylogenetic trees obtained from mtDNA and nDNA gene trees (COI, 16S rRNA, 5.

Molecular phylogeny of the western Palaearctic Helicoidea (Gastropoda, Stylommatophora).

The Helicoidea is one of the most diverse superfamilies of terrestrial land snails. In this study we present a molecular phylogeny of the western Palaearctic Helicoidea obtained by means of neighbor joining, maximum likelihood and Bayesian analysis of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene fragment and the nuclear rRNA gene cluster including the 3' end of the 5.8S gene, the complete ITS2 region and 5' end of the large subunit 28S.