Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons^™

Nudibranchs Of The Ross Sea, Antarctica: Phylogeny, Diversity, And Divergence, Christopher Shields

All Theses

The Southern Ocean (SO) surrounding Antarctica is extremely cold and geographically isolated. The phylogenetic affinities of only a few SO taxa have been examined in detail; in these, a high degree of endemism and radiation within the SO has been established using molecular phylogenetic methods. In order to address these Antarctic paradigms, we used Bayesian inference to construct phylogenetic trees of nudibranch molluscs based on mitochondrial cytochrome-c oxidase I (COI) and 18S ribosomal DNA. We gathered sequences from temperate (COI n=37; 18S n=31) and polar (COI n=21; 18S n=22) species and then combined them with sequences retrieved from GenBank (COI …