Summary Molecular data plays a key role in phylogenetic inference. Mammalian systematics provides us with a clear example, with several previously open evolutionary questions now able to be answered. However, molecular studies have until present used only a handful of classic markers and have not attempted to utilise the information contained within the increasingly large pool of mammalian genome sequences. The identification and utilisation of potentially new informative markers from this pool can help to further resolve the mammalian phylogenetic tree.
Description The EnsEMBL database was used to decide on a set of single-copy orthologous markers from those mammalian genomes available. Exons of reasonable length for further amplification from genomic DNA and sequencing in additional species were then selected. The phylogenetic utility and the evolutionary characteristics of these candidate markers were then evaluated using a homemade bioinformatics pipeline. The resulting OrthoMaM database can be interrogated through this website.
The current OrthoMaM release is based on EnsEMBL v41. It includes 12 taxa and more than 3000 canditate markers.