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. 2006 Oct 27;314(5799):661-3.
doi: 10.1126/science.1130670.

Molecular phylogeny and evolution of morphology in the social amoebas

Pauline Schaap  1 , Thomas Winckler, Michaela Nelson, Elisa Alvarez-Curto, Barrie Elgie, Hiromitsu Hagiwara, James Cavender, Alicia Milano-Curto, Daniel E Rozen, Theodor Dingermann, Rupert Mutzel, Sandra L Baldauf
Affiliations

Molecular phylogeny and evolution of morphology in the social amoebas

Pauline Schaap et al. Science. .

Abstract

The social amoebas (Dictyostelia) display conditional multicellularity in a wide variety of forms. Despite widespread interest in Dictyostelium discoideum as a model system, almost no molecular data exist from the rest of the group. We constructed the first molecular phylogeny of the Dictyostelia with parallel small subunit ribosomal RNA and a-tubulin data sets, and we found that dictyostelid taxonomy requires complete revision. A mapping of characters onto the phylogeny shows that the dominant trend in dictyostelid evolution is increased size and cell type specialization of fruiting structures, with some complex morphologies evolving several times independently. Thus, the latter may be controlled by only a few genes, making their underlying mechanisms relatively easy to unravel.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A universal phylogeny of the Dictyostelia based on SSU rDNA sequences. The tree shown was derived by Bayesian inference from 1655 aligned positions (7). The tree identifies four major taxonomic divisions (Groups 1to 4), which are indicated by separate colors and to the right of the figure beside brackets (Dictyostelium species within Group 2 are indicated in lighter green). The tree includes nearly all known and described species of Dictyostelium (D.), Polysphondylium (P.) and Acytostelium (A.). Bayesian inference posterior probabilities (biPP) are roughly indicated by line width (key at the upper left), with exact biPP and maximum likelihood bootstrap (mlBP) values given in figure S1A. Separate analyses were conducted on Group 4 sequences (7) including an additional 300 more highly divergent nucleotide positions (inset box in the upper right; fig. S1B). Branch lengths are drawn to scale (substitutions per site) as indicated by scale bars. The tree is rooted based on separate analyses (7) including closely related lobosan amoebae (fig. S1C) (10). Branches lengths for the latter were scaled up to compensate for the smaller number of alignable sites, based on the length of the first two internal branches (fig. S1C).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Trait mapping of dictyostelid characters. Consistently documented characters were retrieved from primary species descriptions (table S1, online material) and from Dictyostelium monographs (1, 11). Character states were numerically coded and mapped to the dictyostelid SSU rDNA phylogeny including alternate species (Fig. 1) using the MacClade 4 software package (12). For comprehensive presentation the most informative characters are combinatorially presented on a single tree with the numerical code converted into color code for qualitative traits and into greyscale for quantitative traits. The code key for the character states is shown on the left side of the figure and in table S2. A total set of 20 characters mapped to all species in the phylogeny is presented in figure S5 (7).
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References

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