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Systematic Biology 2005 54(2):230-240; doi:10.1080/10635150590923227
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© 2005 Society of Systematic Biologists

A New Technique for Identifying Sequence Heterochrony

Jonathan E. Jeffery1, Olaf R. P. Bininda-Emonds2, Michael I. Coates3 and Michael K. Richardson1

1 Institute of Biology, Leiden University Kaiserstraat 63, 2311GP Leiden, The Netherlands
2 Lehrstuhl für Tierzucht, Technical University of Munich Alte Akademie 12, 85354 Freising-Weihenstephan, Germany E-mail: Olaf.Bininda{at}tierzucht.tum.de
3 Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago 1027 E. 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

Edited by Greg Wray: Associate Editor Chris Simon Editor


  Abstract

Sequence heterochrony (changes in the order in which events occur) is a potentially important, but relatively poorly explored, mechanism for the evolution of development. In part, this is because of the inherent difficulties in inferring sequence heterochrony across species. The event-pairing method, developed independently by several workers in the mid-1990s, encodes sequences in a way that allows them to be examined in a phylogenetic framework, but the results can be difficult to interpret in terms of actual heterochronic changes. Here, we describe a new, parsimony-based method to interpret such results. For each branch of the tree, it identifies the least number of event movements (heterochronies) that will explain all the observed event-pair changes. It has the potential to find all alternative, equally parsimonious explanations, and generate a consensus, containing the movements that form part of every equally most parsimonious explanation. This new technique, which we call Parsimov, greatly increases the utility of the event-pair method for inferring instances of sequence heterochrony.

Keywords: Developmental sequences; event pairing; heterochrony; Parsimov program; principle of parsimony

Received August 22, 2003; Revised February 8, 2004; Accepted November 15, 2004
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