Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-24-2014
Abstract
Debate continues as to whether allopatric speciation or peripatric speciation through a founder effect is the predominant force driving evolution in vertebrates. The mouse lemurs of Madagascar are a system in which evolution has generated a large number of species over a relatively recent time frame. Here, we examine speciation patterns in a pair of sister species of mouse lemur, Microcebus murinus and M. griseorufus. These two species have ranges that are disparately proportioned in size, with M. murinus showing a much more extensive range that marginally overlaps that of M. griseorufus. Given that these two species are sister taxa, the asymmetric but overlapping geographic ranges are consistent with a model of peripatric speciation. To test this hypothesis, we analyze DNA sequence data from four molecular markers using coalescent methods. If the peripatric speciation model is supported, we predict substantially greater genetic diversity in M. murinus, relative to M. griseorufus. Further, we expect a larger effective population size in M. murinus and in the common ancestor of the two species than in M. griseorufus, with a concomitant decrease in gene tree/species tree incongruence in the latter and weak signs of demographic expansion in M. murinus.
Comments
This article originally appeared in BMC Evolutionary Biology, available at https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1471-2148-14-57.
© Blair et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014 This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.