Rabbits, if anything, are likely Glires

Abstract

Rodentia (e.g., mice, rats, dormice, squirrels, and guinea pigs) and Lagomorpha (e.g., rabbits, hares, and pikas) are usually grouped into the Glires. Status of this controversial superorder has been evaluated using morphology, paleontology, and mitochondrial plus nuclear DNA sequences. This growing corpus of data has been favoring the monophyly of Glires. Recently, Misawa and Janke [Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 28 (2003) 320] analyzed the 6441 amino acids of 20 nuclear proteins for six placental mammals (rat, mouse, rabbit, human, cattle, and dog) and two outgroups (chicken and xenopus), and observed a basal position of the two murine rodents among the former. They concluded that "the Glires hypothesis was rejected." We here reanalyzed [loc. cit.] data set under maximum likelihood and Bayesian tree-building approaches, using phylogenetic models that take into account among-site variation in evolutionary rates and branch-length variation among proteins. Our observations support both the association of rodents and lagomorphs and the monophyly of Euarchontoglires (=Supraprimates) as the most likely explanation of the protein alignments. We conducted simulation studies to evaluate the appropriateness of lissamphibian and avian outgroups to root the placental tree. When the outgroup-to-ingroup evolutionary distance increases, maximum parsimony roots the topology along the long Mus-Rattus branch. Maximum likelihood, in contrast, roots the topology along different branches as a function of their length. Maximum likelihood appears less sensitive to the "long-branch attraction artifact" than is parsimony. Our phylogenetic conclusions were confirmed by the analysis of a different protein data set using a similar sample of species but different outgroups. We also tested the effect of the addition of afrotherian and xenarthran taxa. Using the linearized tree method, [loc. cit.] estimated that mice and rats diverged about 35 million years ago. Molecular dating based on the Bayesian relaxed molecular clock method suggests that the 95% credibility interval for the split between mice and rats is 7-17 Mya. We here emphasize the need for appropriate models of sequence evolution (matrices of amino acid replacement, taking into account among-site rate variation, and independent parameters across independent protein partitions) and for a taxonomically broad sample, and conclude on the likelihood that rodents and lagomorphs together constitute a monophyletic group (Glires).