Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, CSIC, c/ José Gutiérrez Abascal, 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Mol Phylogenet Evol. 2012 Jan;62(1):71-86. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2011.09.008. Epub 2011 Sep 22.
New analytical methods are improving our ability to reconstruct robust species trees from multilocus datasets, despite difficulties in phylogenetic reconstruction associated with recent, rapid divergence, incomplete lineage sorting and/or introgression. In this study, we applied these methods to resolve the radiation of toads in the Bufo bufo (Anura, Bufonidae) species group, ranging from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa to Siberia, based on sequences from two mitochondrial and four nuclear DNA regions (3490 base pairs). We obtained a fully-resolved topology, with the recently described Bufo eichwaldi from the Talysh Mountains in south Azerbaijan and Iran as the sister taxon to a clade including: (1) north African, Iberian, and most French populations, referred herein to Bufo spinosus based on the implied inclusion of populations from its type locality and (2) a second clade, sister to B. spinosus, including two sister subclades: one with all samples of Bufo verrucosissimus from the Caucasus and another one with samples of B. bufo from northern France to Russia, including the Apennine and Balkan peninsulas and most of Anatolia. Coalescent-based estimations of time to most recent common ancestors for each species and selected subclades allowed historical reconstruction of the diversification of the species group in the context of Mediterranean paleogeography and indicated a long evolutionary history in this region. Finally, we used our data to delimit the ranges of the four species, particularly the more widespread and historically confused B. spinosus and B. bufo, and identify potential contact zones, some of which show striking parallels with other co-distributed species.
新的分析方法提高了我们从多基因数据集重建稳健种系发生树的能力，尽管与近期快速分化、不完全谱系分选和/或基因渗入相关的系统发育重建存在困难。在这项研究中，我们应用这些方法来解决分布于从伊比利亚半岛和北非到西伯利亚的 Bufo bufo（蛙形目，蟾蜍科）种组蟾蜍的辐射问题，研究基于来自两个线粒体和四个核 DNA 区域（3490 个碱基对）的序列。我们获得了一个完全解决的拓扑结构，最近在阿塞拜疆南部和伊朗的塔利什山脉描述的 Bufo eichwaldi 是包括以下两个分支的姊妹分类群：（1）北非、伊比利亚和大多数法国种群，本文根据其模式产地种群的暗示包含将其称为 Bufo spinosus；（2）第二个分支，与 Bufo spinosus 姐妹关系，包括两个姐妹亚分支：一个分支包括来自高加索的所有 Bufo verrucosissimus 样本，另一个分支包括来自法国北部到俄罗斯的 Bufo bufo 样本，包括亚平宁半岛和巴尔干半岛以及安纳托利亚的大部分地区。每个物种和选定的亚分支的最近共同祖先的分歧时间的基于合并的估计允许在地中海古地理学的背景下重建物种组的多样化，并表明该地区有很长的进化历史。最后，我们使用我们的数据来限定四个物种的范围，特别是分布更广且历史上更混乱的 Bufo spinosus 和 Bufo bufo，并确定潜在的接触区，其中一些与其他共分布的物种有惊人的相似之处。
