Publication Database

Evolutionary Relationships among Extinct and Extant Sloths: The Evidence of Mitogenomes and Retroviruses (2016)

Art

Zeitschriftenartikel / wissenschaftlicher Beitrag

Autoren

Slater, Graham J

Cui, Pin

Forasiepi, Analía M

Lenz, Dorina

Tsangaras, Kyriakos

Voirin, Bryson

de Moraes-Barros, Nadia

MacPhee, Ross D E

Greenwood, Alex D (WE 12)

Quelle

Genome biology and evolution

Bandzählung: 8

Heftzählung: 3

Seiten: 607 – 621

ISSN: 1759-6653

Sprache

Englisch

Verweise

DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evw023

Pubmed: 26878870

Kontakt

Institut für Tierpathologie

Robert-von-Ostertag-Str. 15
14163 Berlin
+49 30 838 62450
pathologie@vetmed.fu-berlin.de

Abstract / Zusammenfassung

Macroevolutionary trends exhibited by retroviruses are complex and not entirely understood. The sloth endogenized foamy-like retrovirus (SloEFV), which demonstrates incongruence in virus-host evolution among extant sloths (Order Folivora), has not been investigated heretofore in any extinct sloth lineages and its premodern history within folivorans is therefore unknown. Determining retroviral coevolutionary trends requires a robust phylogeny of the viral host, but the highly reduced modern sloth fauna (6 species in 2 genera) does not adequately represent what was once a highly diversified clade (∼100 genera) of placental mammals. At present, the amount of molecular data available for extinct sloth taxa is limited, and analytical results based on these data tend to conflict with phylogenetic inferences made on the basis of morphological studies. To augment the molecular data set, we applied hybridization capture and next-generation Illumina sequencing to two extinct and three extant sloth species to retrieve full mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from the hosts and the polymerase gene of SloEFV. The results produced a fully resolved and well-supported phylogeny that supports dividing crown families into two major clades: 1) The three-toed sloth, Bradypus, and Nothrotheriidae and 2) Megalonychidae, including the two-toed sloth, Choloepus, and Mylodontidae. Our calibrated time tree indicates that the Miocene epoch (23.5 Ma), particularly its earlier part, was an important interval for folivoran diversification. Both extant and extinct sloths demonstrate multiple complex invasions of SloEFV into the ancestral sloth germline followed by subsequent introgressions across different sloth lineages. Thus, sloth mitogenome and SloEFV evolution occurred separately and in parallel among sloths.