Abstract
Veneridae, a cosmopolitan and ubiquitous family in world-wide littoral environments, lists more than 500 species, many of which are often subject to intensive commercial exploitation due to their numerical dominance in benthic communities. Historically, the family has been divided into 12 subfamilies by M. Keen and, even though this taxonomical arrangement was adopted for convenience and does not necessarily reflect genetic relationships, as suggested by Keen herself, this classification is still accepted. To contribute to clarify the systematics and phylogeny of Veneridae, the portion of the nucleotide sequence corresponding to domains IV and V of the gene encoding the large subunit of mitochondrial ribosomal RNA was analysed in 14 species representative of 10 genera belonging to 6 different subfamilies. The results obtained using the maximum-parsimony and neighbour-joining methods indicate that the current placement of the genera into subfamilies does not always reflect a natural subdivision. In addition, the six species of Tapetinae studied, though confirmed to be a monophyletic clade, do not exhibit a correct attribution at the genus level.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Prof. E. Olmo for help in preparation of the manuscript, and M. Taviani for the facilities to obtain Mediterranean Veneridae during the "Lophelia Millenium" cruise (December 1999–January 2000). We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous draft of the manuscript. We declare that the experiments we performed comply with the current laws of Italy. This study was financed by MURST (Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica).
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Communicated by R. Cattaneo-Vietti, Genova
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Canapa, A., Schiaparelli, S., Marota, I. et al. Molecular data from the 16S rRNA gene for the phylogeny of Veneridae (Mollusca: Bivalvia). Marine Biology 142, 1125–1130 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-003-1048-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-003-1048-1