Throughout the past four and half billion years, life has evolved continuously. Evolution has allowed species of organisms to have drastic changes in both their genetic and morphological traits. This has occurred in such a way to reinforce the organism’s survival rate. Using phylogenetics, it is possible to determine information such as what type of changes occurred between the last common ancestor of the organism and any new species that have emerged in recent years. Phylogenetic trees are constructed using molecular sequencing data and once the differences in traits have been identified, it is possible to determine which traits are caused by changes in molecular sequences. In this bioinformatics lab, phylogenetics was applied to bears. The …show more content…
This species is usually found in the South American Andes. Most cytological and molecular evidence points towards the fact that the Spectacled bear diverged from the genus Ursus (O’Brien et al., 1985). The other species that was the focus of this lab was the giant panda. Over the years, scientists have started to link the giant panda being more closely related to the red panda than the bears, but through the use of comparative anatomical work and protein evolution, scientists have decided that the giant panda should be placed in its own subfamily (McLellan, …show more content…
Distance Matrix of 8 bear species, along with the out group mephitidae. The neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree produced clades with four bootstrap values above 50. The Polar bear and the Brown bear had a bootstrap value of 100. When looking at the Panda,the only bootstrap given was 68 , but it was with the monophyletic group encompassing all (Figure1). The neighbor-joining tree creates a tree based on the similarity seen in the distance data (Nydam, O’Quin, and Wooten, 2015). The Maximum Parsimony tree produced results in congruence with the results seen in the neighbor-joining tree. Polar bear and Brown bear had a bootstrap value of 100 while the only bootstrap encompassing the panda had a value of 74 (Figure 2). The Maximum Parsimony tree differs from the nighbor-joining tree in that it looks at subsets of the sequence to see if the organisms are derived, different from a common ancestor, or shared, similar among closely related taxa (Nydam, O’ Quin, and Wooten,