Nitesh Chetry
Biol& 212 AA
Research Project Blog #1
In our project, my group ran a gel electrophoresis of muscle
proteins from a turkey, cougar, bear, pig, sheep, and cow to determine the
phylogeny of mammal species, three of them being ungulates, with the turkey as
our non-mammalian outgroup.
A simple, observational way to look at the relationship
between these five species of mammals may be to look at their food sources and
eating patterns. “The clustering by diet (herbivore, omnivore, and carnivore)
was highly significant in both the tree-based (Figure S2) and network-based
analyses (Figure 1B). In the network-based analysis, host nodes are
significantly more connected to other host nodes from the same diet group” (Ley
et al. 2008). With more similar food and eating patterns, two species are more likely to be closely related. For example, the tiger is the only carnivore that we
chose to observe in lab, likely meaning that it will relate least to the other
mammals. In addition, bears and pigs are omnivores which means that they likely
are closely related in phylogeny as compared to sheep and cows which are both cud-chewing
herbivores. Looking at the eating patterns in these animals gives a reasonable expectation
of the phylogeny between these species that may or may not be held up by the
data showed by the protein gel electrophoresis.
Ley R, Hamady M, Lozupone
C, Turnbaugh P, Ramey R, Bircher J, Schlegel
M, Tucker T, Schrenzel M, Knight R, Gordon J. 2008. Evolution of mammals and
their gut microbes. In: National Center for Biotechnology Information
[Internet]. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of
Science; [cited 2017 Feb 10]. Available from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649005/
No comments:
Post a Comment