A Phylogeny Based on the Concatenated 9 Protein-coding Gene Sequences of Mt Genomes among Three Gibbon Genera

Abstract

The objective of this study was to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships of gibbons (3 genera, 11 species) deduced from complete sequenced mitochondrial genome sequences. According to conserved (C) / variable (V) sites ratio test, 9 selected protein coding genes were combined into a sequence with 9356 bases long including gaps. A resolved phylogenetic tree was obtained for the mitochondrial genome in the maximum-likelihood and maximum-parsimony analyses. In accordance with all previous morphological and molecular evidence, our results clearly supported monophyly of family Hylobatidae with predominantly strongly supported and each of the three genera with high support based on these coding genes. Among three genera, first Nomascus, next Symphalangus and at last Hylobates diverged, which identical to other previous research based on the whole mitochondrial genome. Our phylogenetic relationships of Nomascus group accord with Chan et al. (2010), only support values of a node of N. gabriellae (90%) were slight lower than Chan's result (97%). Among genus Hylobates, in our result, 6 species are involved and H. pileatus, H. lar, H. klossii, H. agilis, H. moloch and H. muelleri diverged sequentially.