General relationships of mammalian orders and evolutionary development of primates inferred from best-fit α-globin phylogenies.

A best-fit α-globin phylogeny was identified by means of a global minimization approach from among the topologies generated by a parsimony strategy. Zip parsimony method was used to derive a set of near-parsimonious trees. For each of these topologies, a difference matrix was computed; and the topology with the best goodness of fit with the original matrix was retained as the best tree. Based on this phylogenetic scheme interrelationships among eutherian orders and the evolutionary development of primates has been discussed.

Evolutionary trends in the hemoglobins of murine animals.

The evolutionary origin of murine line based on a phylogenetic tree made on sequence data of ∝-and β-hemoglobin chains, followed by the diversity spectrum of hemoglobin genes in two wild species of murine rodents: Rattus rattus rufescens (house rat) and Bandicota indica (bandicoot rat) has been reported. Each house rat contains six hemoglobin types involving two ∝-and three β-chains, which suggests a probable gene duplication at the ∝ chain locus and a gene triplication at the β-chain locus. Each bandicoot rat contains one ∝-and two β-chains suggesting a probable gene duplication at the β-chain locus. Peptide pattern analysis of the polypeptide chains of these murine hemoglobins further indicates that intraspecies differences among duplicated chains of the same kind are less than interspecies differences among corresponding ∝- and β-chains.