Abstract
The short and long term effects of polyploidization on the evolutionary fate of lineages is still unclear despite much interest. First recognized in land plants, it has become clear that polyploidization is widespread in eukaryotes, notably at the origin of vertebrates and teleost fishes. Many hypotheses have been proposed to link the species richness of lineages and whole genome duplications. For instance, the radiation time lag model suggests that paleopolyploidy would favour the apparition of new phenotypic traits, although the radiation of the lineage would not occur before a later dispersion event. Some results indicate that this model may be observed during land plant evolution. In this work, we test predictions of the radiation time lag model using both fossil data and molecular phylogenies in ancient and more recent teleost whole genome duplications. We fail to find any evidence of delayed increase of the species number after any of these events and conclude that paleopolyploidization still remains to be unambiguously linked to taxonomic diversity in teleosts.
Highlights
The understanding of how biodiversity changes and is maintained on Earth has long fascinated biologists
Our expectation is that we should see a consistent pattern with a surge in diversification sometime after the whole genome duplication event. For this we explicitly model the changes in rates of diversification through time, using both molecular and fossil based knowledge extracted from the literature, on ancient and more recent whole genome duplications
The subtree noted ‘E’ in Fig 2 represents the youngest whole genome duplication event studied in this work, and no difference is found between polyploids and diploids
Summary
The understanding of how biodiversity changes and is maintained on Earth has long fascinated biologists. Studying historical biodiversity trends was originally performed by observing the fossil record in successive geological layers [1] and using models to explain the apparition of new clades [2]. New ways of studying the evolution of lineages through time are available. These involve the joint use of molecular clocks and fossil calibrations in a maximum likelihood [3] or Bayesian [4, 5] framework, on the one hand, and of methods enabling evolutionary inferences based on molecular phylogenies [6, 7], on the other hand. Various scenarios have been proposed to explain the effects of polyploidy on diversification rates.
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