A nesting of vipers: Phylogeny and historical biogeography of the Viperidae Squamata: Serpentes

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A nesting of vipers Phylogeny and historical
biogeography of the Viperidae (Squamata
Serpentes)

• Wokfgang Wüster, Lindsay Peppin, Catherine E.
  Pook, Daniel E. Walker, Molecular Phylogenetics
  and Evolution, 2008, Vol. 49, 445-459

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Question/Hypothesis

• The taxon Azemiops may be sister clades of the
  Crotalinae.
• The focus is to analyze of nuclear and
  mitochondrial DNA sequences.
• The hypothesis of the paper is that in fact the
  Azemiops are sister taxon of Crotalinae.

VS.
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Why?
Knowing if the Azemiops and Crotalinae are in
fact sister clades may help the production of
antivenom and the treatment of various medical
conditions.
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Materials

• NADH4
• 12s
• 16s
• DNA was extracted from ventral scale clippings,
  tissue samples, and shedded skin
• Some sequences were reused from GenBank.

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What I have done.

• Alignment in MacClade
• Run alignment in PAUP
• Distance trees
• Bootstrap values
• Parsimony trees
• Maximum likelihood trees

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Maximum Parsimony
57
Vipers (Crotalinae)
100
Azemiops
Distance
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GenBank

• The 16s ribosomal gene was used
• The NADH4, and 12s ribosomal genes were also used
  but I didnt not collect data on them.

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Comparison of Results

• After the alignment in MacClade and the results
  of the paper did not agree with all three trees
  that I have come up with.
• Even though my results were different I believe
  that they are still sister clades.
• My results agreed with them in some areas and not
  in others.
• My results may be thrown off by not having the
  best outgroup, and various other reasons.