Roca Alfred L
Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Trends Genet. 2008 Feb;24(2):49-52. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2007.11.005. Epub 2008 Jan 14.
The mitochondrial genome of an American mastodon was recently sequenced and used to root a phylogenetic analysis that included full mitochondrial genome sequences from woolly mammoths and the two living elephant genera. The study definitively established that mammoth and Asian elephant mitochondrial DNA lineages are more closely related than either is to African elephants. However, it also suggests that a complex evolutionary picture could ultimately emerge and points to similarities between the early evolution of the Elephantidae and that of the gorilla-human-chimpanzee clade.
最近，人们对一头美洲乳齿象的线粒体基因组进行了测序，并将其用于一项系统发育分析的溯源，该分析涵盖了猛犸象以及两个现存象属的完整线粒体基因组序列。这项研究明确证实，猛犸象和亚洲象的线粒体DNA谱系比它们与非洲象的关系更为密切。然而，研究也表明，最终可能会呈现出一幅复杂的进化图景，并指出象科动物早期进化与大猩猩 - 人类 - 黑猩猩进化分支之间存在相似之处。
