Molecular Phylogeny of Chlorarachniophytes Based on Plastid rRNA and rbcL Sequences

Abstract

Nucleotide sequences of chloroplast-encoded small subunit rRNA genes have been determined for three strains of chlorarachniophyte algae.The chlorarachniophyte sequences were added to phylogenies incorporating plastid and bacterial sequences in an attempt to define the evolutionary relationships of the eukaryotic endosymbiont from which chlorarachniophytes acquired photosynthetic capacity.Substitutional bias increasing the AT content of the chlorarachniophyte rRNA genes apparently confounds the inference of plastid phylogenetic relationships using traditional methodology (distance, parsimony, maximum likelihood).However, when the LogDet transformation (a method allowing more accurate tree inf..