UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN, RICARDO ROCHAAn examination of species-level genetic diversity by researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Natural History Museum of Denmark provides a global map of intraspecific genetic diversity for two classes of animals—amphibians and mammals. The team’s findings, published today (September 29) in Science, confirm that tropical regions harbor more genetically diverse species and show that the presence of nearby human settlements has diminished genetic diversity within the amphibian and mammalian species studied.
“The results support earlier findings, but the very large sample size in this study represents a substantial advance,” Len Gillman of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand who was not involved in the study wrote in an email to The Scientist. “It suggests that tropical species have a greater potential for speciation than temperate species [and] supports the hypothesis that differences in diversity across the globe are, at least to some extent, due to differences in the rate of evolution and speciation.”
The researchers pulled publicly available genetic sequence data on amphibian and mammal species, comparing cytochrome B sequences for the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that included geographic information (about 27 percent of available mammal sequences examined, and 38 percent of amphibian sequences). This ...
