They are young, and they are many: dating freshwater lineages in unicellular dinophytes.

Environ Microbiol

Department Biologie, Systematische Botanik und Mykologie, GeoBio-Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Menzinger Street. 67, 80638 Munich, Germany.

Published: November 2019

Dinophytes are one of few protist groups that have an extensive fossil record and are therefore appropriate for time estimations. However, insufficient sequence data and strong rate heterogeneity have been hindering to put dinophyte evolution into a time frame until now. Marine-to-freshwater transitions within this group are considered geologically old and evolutionarily exceptional due to strong physiological constraints that prevent such processes. Phylogenies based on concatenated rRNA sequences (including 19 new GenBank entries) of two major dinophyte lineages, Gymnodiniaceae and Peridiniales, were carried out using an uncorrelated molecular clock and five calibration points based on fossils. Contrarily to previous assumptions, marine-to-freshwater transitions are more frequent in dinophytes (i.e. five marine-freshwater transitions in Gymnodiniaceae, up to ten but seven strongly supported transitions in Peridiniales), and none of them occurred as early as 140 MYA. Furthermore, most marine-to-freshwater transitions, and the followed diversification, took place after the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Not older than 40 MYA, the youngest transitions within Gymnodiniaceae and Peridiniales occurred under the influence of the Eocene climate shift. Our evolutionary scenario indicates a gradual diversification of dinophytes without noticeable impact of catastrophic events, and their freshwater lineages have originated several times independently at different points in time.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.14766DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

marine-to-freshwater transitions
12
freshwater lineages
8
gymnodiniaceae peridiniales
8
transitions gymnodiniaceae
8
peridiniales occurred
8
transitions
6
young dating
4
dating freshwater
4
lineages unicellular
4
dinophytes
4

Similar Publications

Habitat transitions have shaped the evolutionary trajectory of many clades. Sea catfishes (Ariidae) have repeatedly undergone ecological transitions, including colonizing freshwaters from marine environments, leading to an adaptive radiation in Australia and New Guinea alongside non-radiating freshwater lineages elsewhere. Here, we generate and analyze one long-read reference genome and 66 short-read whole genome assemblies, in conjunction with genomic data for 54 additional species.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Analyses of the cetacean (whale and dolphin) inner ear provide glimpses into the ecology and evolution of extinct and extant groups. The paleoecology of the long-snouted odontocete (toothed whale) group, Parapontoporia, is primarily marine with its depositional context also suggesting freshwater tolerance. As an extinct relative of the exclusively riverine Lipotes vexillifer, Parapontoporia provides insight into a transition from marine to freshwater environments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

AbstractAdaptation to replicated environmental conditions can be remarkably predictable, suggesting that parallel evolution may be a common feature of adaptive radiation. An open question, however, is how phenotypic variation itself evolves during repeated adaptation. Here, we use a dataset of morphological measurements from 35 populations of threespine stickleback, consisting of 16 parapatric lake-stream pairs and three marine populations, to understand how phenotypic variation has evolved during transitions from marine to freshwater environments and during subsequent diversification across the lake-stream boundary.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Late Pleistocene stickleback environmental genomes reveal the chronology of freshwater adaptation.

Curr Biol

March 2024

Department of Natural History, NTNU University Museum, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Erling Skakkes gate 47A, 7012 Trondheim, Norway; Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, 0316 Oslo, Norway. Electronic address:

Directly observing the chronology and tempo of adaptation in response to ecological change is rarely possible in natural ecosystems. Sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) has been shown to be a tractable source of genome-scale data of long-dead organisms and to thereby potentially provide an understanding of the evolutionary histories of past populations. To date, time series of ecosystem biodiversity have been reconstructed from sedaDNA, typically using DNA metabarcoding or shotgun sequence data generated from less than 1 g of sediment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cenozoic colonisation of the Indian Ocean region by the Australian freshwater-originating glassperch family Ambassidae (Teleostei).

Mol Phylogenet Evol

September 2023

Institute of Marine Biotechnology, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, 21030 Kuala Terengganu, Terengganu, Malaysia; School of Biological Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Pulau Pinang, Malaysia.

We examined the phylogeny and biogeography of the glassperch family Ambassidae (Teleostei), which is widely distributed in the freshwater, brackish and marine coastal habitats across the Indo-West Pacific region. We first built a comprehensive time-calibrated phylogeny of Ambassidae using five genes. We then used this tree to reconstruct the evolution of the salinity preference and ancestral areas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!