Phylogenetic relationships in the family Cetopsidae (Osteichthyes, Ostariophysi, Siluriformes) with simultaneous analysis of morphological and molecular data

Abstract

The Neotropical catfish Cetopsidae is a family of Siluriformes that includes five genera and 42 recognized species, distributed throughout northern and central regions of South America, to both sides of the Andean cordilleras. The monophyly of the family is supported by several previous studies, however its internal relations require further clarification because there are not monophyletic clades. Despite the scarcity of evolutionary studies on the nervous system of catfish, this complex shows great variation potentially informative and promising to phylogenetic studies. In addition, phylogenetic studies with molecular data have never been done specifically on Cetopsidae. Therefore, this project aims to address these problems in a unique perspective that will include original neuroanatomical data unexplored compared, concatenated with data segments of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, and data already available in recent studies, in order to prepare an phylogenetic analysis in Cetopsidae. Therefore, the choice of terminal taxa will be made considering the highest possible compatibility with the previously analyzes carried out both internally and externally group. The vast majority of the material used will come from collections already available, and additional collections will be made at specific locations to target species. The new data from the neuroanatomical complex will be encoded into discrete states of characters and will be combined with the literature data in a concatenated matrix in order to perform a parsimony analysis that includes all available morphological evidence. Will also be sequenced segments of the mitochondrial genes 12S rRNA ribosomal (12S), cytochrome oxidase I (COI) and cytochrome b (cyt b) in addition to the nuclear genes encoding proteins recombination activating protein (rag 1 and rag 2). After the alignment of segments and choice of evolutionary models, maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood analyzes will be performed. Finally, a concatenated array with all available data, and a combined maximum parsimony analysis will be carried out will be established. (AU)