A metaanalysis of bat phylogenetics and positive selection based on genomes and transcriptomes from 18 species

Hawkins, John A.; Kaczmarek, Maria E.; Müller, Marcel A.; Drosten, Christian; Press, William H.; Sawyer, Sara L.

Unfortunately, the diversity that makes bats interesting also makes them difficult to study. Genetic information allows researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the evolutionary origins of such diverse taxa. There are several previous phylogenic analyses conducted with bats across the order Chiroptera (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) . Given the difficulty of obtaining genetic data from a species group with such extreme diversity, there has historically been a tradeoff between number of loci analyzed and number of species analyzed (i.e., more loci can be reasonably analyzed only when a smaller number of species is considered). Some studies tackle hundreds of species at once. Most recently, Amador et al. constructed a tree containing 799 species by performing a supermatrix analysis with maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony methods using up to nine gene sequences per species (16) . Highthroughput sequencing is now lessening the burden of this tradeoff because a number of bats across the order Chiroptera have had their genomes or transcriptomes sequenced in bulk. Two studies have undertaken phylogenetic analyses of these large datasets (13, 15) .