Animal mitochondrial DNA is a small, extrachromosomal genome, typically∼ 16 kb in size.
With few exceptions, all animal mitochondrial genomes contain the same 37 genes: two for …

One of the most important aspects of mitochondrial (mt) genome evolution in Metazoa is
constancy of size and gene content of mtDNA, whose plasticity is maintained through a great …

The use of some multiple-sequence alignments in phylogenetic analysis, particularly those
that are not very well conserved, requires the elimination of poorly aligned positions and …

Alignment quality may have as much impact on phylogenetic reconstruction as the
phylogenetic methods used. Not only the alignment algorithm, but also the method used to …

We report the sequence and analysis of the 814-megabase genome of the sea urchin
Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a model for developmental and systems biology. The …

DNA sequence data have offered valuable insights into the relationships between living
organisms. However, most phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences rely primarily on single …

Mitochondrial genomes are being used to study increasingly ancient divergences among
animal groups. Recent studies of complete mitochondrial DNA sequences have arrived at …

The phylogenetic relationships among deuterostome animals have been debated for many
years, and a diversity of hypotheses have been proposed based on both morphological and …

Insight into the origin and early evolution of the animal phyla requires an understanding of
how animal groups are related to one another. Thus, we set out to explore animal phylogeny …

We report a contiguous region of more than half (> 7,500 nt) of the mitochondrial genomes
for Platynereis dumerii (Annelida: Polychaeta), Helobdella robusta (Annelida: Hirudinida) …