Phylogenetic Relationships among the Species of Aegla (Anomura: Aeglidae) Freshwater Crabs from Chile

Distributional patterns of the South American species of Hyalella (Amphipoda: Hyalellidae)

“…Our results contrast with those from calanoid copepods (MenuMarque et al 2000) and fi shes of the genus Galaxias (Cussac et al 2004), that are known from southern Patagonia, New Zealand and adjacent islands, a different situation was reported for species of Hyalella that are widespread in South North America (Witt & Hebert, 2000;Witt et al 2003). The results of geographical distribution of Hyalella genus are similar in comparison to freshwater crabs of Aegla genus that is located in central and southern Argentina and Chile, and east South America, specifi cally Brazil and Uruguay (Pérez-Lozada et al, 2002, 2009). Nevertheless, species reports for practically all South American inland waters are rather scarce, so future analyses may modify these results, specifi cally between 18-8° N, the Titicaca basin, and eastern South America.…”

Conservation Assessment of Southern South American Freshwater Ecoregions on the Basis of the Distribution and Genetic Diversity of Crabs from the Genus Aegla

“…A. lata no longer occurs within its native distribution and A. microphthalma is a stygobiotic species that only occurs in a single cave that is very difficult to access (G.B.-B., personal observation). As in previous studies (Pérez-Losada et al 2002b, 2004, we collected sequence data for complete nuclear 28S ribosomal and partial mitochondrial 12S, 16S, COI, and COII genes, which yielded a concatenated data set of 5601 nucleotides. This data set was analyzed with model selection, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian phylogenetic methods as described in Pérez-Losada et al (2004).…”

“…In addition, if genetic distancebased methods are applied, the use of multiple gene regions (ideally including mitochondrial and nuclear loci) is recommended for accurately estimating lengths of tree branches (Crozier 1997). We have investigated Aegla evolutionary relationships for 10 years with DNA-sequence data (Pérez-Losada et al 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2004. Results of our previous studies and of new phylogenetic analyses presented here are based on multiple nuclear and mitochondrial genes, several outgroup species, and almost all the known aeglids for which several populations and individuals have been collected.…”

Comparison of different methodologies for DNA extraction from Aegla longirostri

“…Molecular biology offers useful tools for the population and phylogenetic studies, which have been widely applied in taxonomic and conservation researches for several crustacean orders (Ovenden et al, 1992;Staton and Felder, 1995;Levinton et al, 1996;Chu et al, 1999;Schubart et al, 2000;Xu et al, 2001;Fratini and Vannini, 2002). Despite its importance and particularities, there are few molecular studies with the genus Aegla (D'Amato and Corach, 1997;Perez-Lozada et al, 2002a;Perez-Lozada et al, 2002b). Most approaches require primarily high molecular weight DNA, which demands undegraded material with an efficient DNA extraction method.…”