The two small aquatic invertebrates are called kamptozoa and bryozoa. They're related to mollusks, bristleworms, earthworms, and ribbon worms. Evolutionary biologists have always been puzzled by their exact position on the tree of life. They have been moved by previous studies. When they were first thought to form one group, they were separated based on their appearance and body parts.
Scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University and colleagues from Tsukuba University used cutting-edge sequencing technology and powerful computational analysis to reveal the split between mollusks and worms.
The first author of the paper published in Science Advances said that they have shown that transcriptomic data can be used to answer a long standing question.
Every cell has a genome. There is a way to divide it into genes. The proper care and maintenance of a cell can be achieved by the proper use of these genes. The instructions must be carried out with the help of the DNA. The result of this is a transcriptome that is written in RNA base pairs.
Different genetic information is available for different species. A greater evolutionary distance leads to more genetic differences for those who are close to each other. Researchers have improved their knowledge of animal evolution, but some questions are still hard to answer.
Small mistakes in the dataset or missing data can cause an incorrect placement on the evolutionary tree. It's easy to pick up other organisms that are in the sample. Dr. Khalturin said that they were careful to avoid being contaminated and that they screened their data for any that may have come from them.
The researchers were able to sequence the transcriptome of four different species of Kamptozoa and two different species of Bryozoa. The transcriptome completeness was over 98% in this study, compared to 20% in the previous study.
They used transcriptomes to compare them to similar data of 31 other species, some of which were related to Kamptozoa and Bryozoa. They were able to compare many different genes at the same time. The researchers were able to use the powerful computational capabilities at OIST.
According to Dr. Khalturin, the two phyla are related. The result was originally proposed by biologists in the 19th century.
Dr. Khalturin highlighted that the dataset could answer other fundamental evolutionary questions, such as the location of mollusks and annelids on the tree of life, and how life diversified.
More information: Konstantin Khalturin, Polyzoa is back: The effect of complete gene sets on the placement of Ectoprocta and Entoprocta, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo4400. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo4400 Journal information: Science Advances
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