Weighting and Congruence: A Case Study Based on Three Mitochondrial Genes in Pitvipers

Enzymatic and toxinological activities of Hypnale hypnale (hump-nosed pit viper) venom and its fractionation by ion exchange high performance liquid chromatography

“…These activities are hallmark of the pathophysiology induced by pit viper venoms. The general similarities in the biological activities of H. hypnale venom and C. rhodostoma venom are expected as they are closely related phylogenetically, hence the possibility of sharing similar venom antigens (47,48).…”

A Phylogeny of the Trimeresurus Group of Pit Vipers: New Evidence from a Mitochondrial Gene Tree

“…Some form of weighting is often used in parsimony analysis to compensate for homoplasy due to the saturation of rapidly evolving positions. However, this has recently been shown to be ineffective by studies that have tested alternative weighting schemes (Allard and Carpenter, 1996;Philippe et al, 1996;Milinkovitch and Lyons-Weiler, 1998;Vidal and Lecointre, 1998), with much phylogenetic information being discarded in the process. Thus, all the MP analyses presented in this paper are on unweighted data only.…”

“…These were for the species P. tokarensis (Accession No. AFO38884, from Vidal and Lecointre [1998] (Milinkovitch and Lyons-Weiler, 1998) suggest that ingroup topology may be radically altered by use of different outgroups. A number of viperine genera were therefore used as outgroups, represented by Daboia russelii, Macrovipera mauritanica (provided by P. Lenk), and Echis ocellatus, as well as a representative of another family, Naja siamensis (the latter two sequences were provided by W. Wü ster).…”

“…Both these studies supported the paraphyly of Trimeresurus s.l. (see also Vidal and Lecointre, 1998) and the monophyly of Trimeresurus s.s. (three species) and Protobothrops (two or three species). The monophyly and affinities of Ovophis are still unresolved, as no study to date has included more than one species.…”

“…Although a number of molecular studies on crotalines have recently appeared (Kraus et al, 1996;Vidal et al, 1997;Parkinson et al, 1997;Vidal and Lecointre, 1998;Parkinson, 1999), these focus largely on New World species, and few have included more than one species of Trimeresurus. The most comprehensive studies are Kraus et al (1996) and Parkinson (1999), which included seven and eight species of Trimeresurus s.l., respectively.…”