Page:Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution vol81 pp71-85.pdf/1



Thomas Cavalier-Smith, Ema E. Chao, Elizabeth A. Snell, Cédric Berney, Anna Maria Fiore-Donno , Rhodri Lewis

Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK

1. Introduction

Phylogenetically, all eukaryotes have been assigned to just three supergroups: podiates, corticates (kingdoms Plantae and Chromista), and Eozoa (excavates and Euglenozoa). The entirely heterotrophic podiates, the focus of this paper, include Animalia, Fungi, and four protozoan phyla (Sulcozoa, Amoebozoa, Choanozoa Microsporidia); they are so called because of the general presence of pseudopodia except in the derived Fungi that lost them. Originally 'excavates' excluded Euglenozoa, but later these distinctive flagellates were included despite not sharing excavate morphology  under the influence of a probably erroneous assumption about the location of the eukaryotic root; here we follow in excluding Euglenozoa from excavates. Multigene trees usually show corticates as a clade, but are contradictory concerning the boundary between the excavate Eozoa and the putatively basal podiate phylum Sulcozoa. The problem lies in the uncertain phylogenetic position of the excavate flagellate Malawimonas    ). Some multigene trees show podiates as a clade with Malawimonas one node deeper (e.g. ); others place Malawimonas within podiates, typically as sister to the sulcozoan flagellate Collodictyon (e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2014.08.012 1055-7903/© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).