- Resolution among major placental mammal interordinal
relationships with genome data imply that speciation influenced
their earliest radiations (2008) - Background: A number of the
deeper divergences in the placental mammal tree are still
inconclusively resolved despite extensive phylogenomic analyses.
A recent analysis of 200 kbp of protein coding sequences yielded
only limited support for the relationships among Laurasiatheria
(cow, dog, bat and shrew), probably because the divergences
occurred only within a few million years from each other. It is
generally expected that increasing the amount of data and
improving the taxon sampling enhance the resolution of narrow
divergences. Therefore these and other difficult splits were
examined by phylogenomic analysis of the hitherto largest
sequence alignment. The increasingly complete genome data of
placental mammals also allowed developing a novel and stringent
data search method. Results: The rigorous data handling,
recursive BLAST, successfully removed the seq