Biology subjects

Antonelli, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Antonelli, A..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Improved estimation of macroevolutionary rates from fossil data using a Bayesian framework

The estimation of origination and extinction rates and their temporal variation is central to understanding diversity patterns and the evolutionary history of clades. The fossil record provides the most direct evidence of extinction and biodiversity changes through time and has long been used to infer the dynamics of diversity changes in deep time. The software PyRate implements a Bayesian framework to analyze fossil occurrence data to estimate the rates of preservation, origination and extinction while incorporating several sources of uncertainty. This fully probabilistic approach allows us to explicitly assess the statistical support of alternative macroevolutionary hypotheses and to infer credible intervals around parameter estimates. Here, we present a major update of the software, which implements substantial methodological advancements, including more complex and realistic models of preservation, a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate origination and extinction rates and their temporal variation, and a substantial boost in performance. We demonstrate the new functionalities through extensive simulations and with the analysis of a large dataset of Cenozoic marine mammals. We identify several significant shifts in origination and extinction rates of marine mammals, underlying a late Miocene diversity peak and a subsequent 50% diversity decline towards the present. Our analyses indicate that explicit statistical model testing, which is often neglected in fossil-based macroevolutionary analyses, is crucial to obtain accurate and robust results. PyRate provides a flexible, statistically sound analytical framework, which we think can serve as a useful toolkit for many future studies in paleobiology.

paleontology↗

bioRxiv2018

Human activity is altering the world’s zoogeographical regions

Human activity leading to both species introductions and extinctions is widely known to influence diversity patterns on local and regional scales. Yet, it is largely unknown whether the intensity of this activity is enough to affect the configuration of biodiversity at broader levels of spatial organization. Zoogeographical regions, or zooregions, are surfaces of the Earth defined by characteristic pools of species, which reflect ecological, historical, and evolutionary processes acting over millions of years. Consequently, it is widely assumed that zooregions are robust and unlikely to change on a human timescale. Here, however, we show that human-mediated introductions and extinctions can indeed reconfigure the currently recognized zooregions of amphibians, mammals, and birds. In particular, introductions homogenize the African and Eurasian zooregions in mammals; reshape boundaries with the reallocation of Oceania to the New World zooregion in amphibians; and divide bird zooregions by increasing biotic heterogeneity. Furthermore, the combined effect of amphibian introductions and extinctions has the potential to divide two zooregions largely representing the Old and the New World. Interestingly, the robustness of zooregions against changes in species composition may largely explain such zoogeographical changes. Altogether, our results demonstrate that human activities can erode the higher-level organization of biodiversity formed over millions of years. Comparable reconfigurations have previously been detectable in Earths history only after glaciations and mass extinction events, highlighting the profound and far-reaching impact of ongoing human activity and the need to protect the uniqueness of biotic assemblages from the effects of future species introductions and extinctions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Allele Phasing Greatly Improves the Phylogenetic Utility of Ultraconserved Elements

Advances in high-throughput sequencing techniques now allow relatively easy and affordable sequencing of large portions of the genome, even for non-model organisms. Many phylogenetic studies reduce costs by focusing their sequencing efforts on a selected set of targeted loci, commonly enriched using sequence capture. The advantage of this approach is that it recovers a consistent set of loci, each with high sequencing depth, which leads to more confidence in the assembly of target sequences. High sequencing depth can also be used to identify phylogenetically informative allelic variation within sequenced individuals, but allele sequences are infrequently assembled in phylogenetic studies.\n\nInstead, many scientists perform their phylogenetic analyses using contig sequences which result from the de novo assembly of sequencing reads into contigs containing only canonical nucleobases, and this may reduce both statistical power and phylogenetic accuracy. Here, we develop an easy-to-use pipeline to recover allele sequences from sequence capture data, and we use simulated and empirical data to demonstrate the utility of integrating these allele sequences to analyses performed under the Multispecies Coalescent (MSC) model. Our empirical analyses of Ultraconserved Element (UCE) locus data collected from the South American hummingbird genus Topaza demonstrate that phased allele sequences carry sufficient phylogenetic information to infer the genetic structure, lineage divergence, and biogeographic history of a genus that diversified during the last three million years. The phylogenetic results support the recognition of two species, and suggest a high rate of gene flow across large distances of rainforest habitats but rare admixture across the Amazon River. Our simulations provide evidence that analyzing allele sequences leads to more accurate estimates of tree topology and divergence times than the more common approach of using contig sequences.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Evolutionary history of New World monkeys revealed by molecular and fossil data

New World monkeys (parvorder Platyrrhini) are one of the most diverse groups of primates, occupying today a wide range of ecosystems in the American tropics and exhibiting large variations in ecology, morphology, and behavior. Although the relationships among the almost 200 living species are relatively well understood, we lack robust estimates of the timing of origin, the ancestral morphology, and the evolution of the distribution of the clade. Here we integrate paleontological and molecular evidence to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of extinct and extant platyrrhines. We develop an analytical framework to infer ancestral states, the evolution of body mass, and changes in latitudinal ranges through time. Our results show that extant platyrrhines originated some 5-10 million years earlier than previously assumed, likely dating back to the Middle Eocene ([~] 43 million years ago, Ma). The estimated ancestral platyrrhine was strikingly small - weighing [~] 0.4 kg, as compared to the largest modern species over 10 kg - matching the size of their presumed Eocene North African ancestors. Small-sized callitrichines (marmosets and tamarins) retained a small body mass throughout their evolutionary history, thus challenging the hypothesis of phyletic dwarfism as an explanation to their adaptive traits. In contrast, a rapid change in body mass range took place as the three families diverged between the Late Oligocene and the Early Miocene. That period also marks a peak in diversity of fossil platyrrhines and is associated with their widest latitudinal range, expanding as far to the South as Patagonia. This geographic expansion is temporally coincident with a significant increase in platyrrhine population size inferred from genomic data, and with warm and humid climatic conditions linked to the Miocene Climatic Optimum and the lower elevation of the Andes. These results unveil the early evolution of an iconic group of monkeys and showcase the advantages of integrating fossil and molecular data for estimating evolutionary rates and trends.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2017

Recent origin of Neotropical orchids in the world’s richest plant biodiversity hotspot

* The Andean mountains of South America are the most species-rich biodiversity hotspot worldwide with about 15% of the worlds plant species, in only 1% of the worlds land surface. Orchids are a key element of the Andean flora, and one of the most prominent components of the Neotropical epiphyte diversity, yet very little is known about their origin and diversification.\n\n* We address this knowledge gap by inferring the biogeographical history and evolutionary dynamics of the two largest Neotropical orchid groups (Cymbidieae and Pleurothallidinae), using two unparalleled, densely-sampled orchid phylogenies (including 400+ newly generated DNA sequences), comparative phylogenetic methods, geological and biological datasets.\n\n* We find that the majority of Andean orchid lineages only originated in the last 15 million years. Most Andean lineages are derived from lowland Amazonian ancestors, with additional contributions from Central America and the Antilles. Species diversification is correlated with Andean orogeny, and multiple migrations and re-colonizations across the Andes indicate that mountains do not constrain orchid dispersal over long timescales.\n\n* Our study sheds new light on the timing and geography of a major Neotropical radiation, and suggests that mountain uplift promotes species diversification across all elevational zones.

evolutionary biology↗