Drosophila melanogaster Models of Friedreich’s Ataxia

Figure 1

Molecular phylogenetic analysis of frataxin sequences from different species. The picture of Thomas Hunt Morgan was chosen to represent Homo sapiens because, as a result of his work, D. melanogaster became a major model organism in genetics. Methods: evolutionary history was inferred with the maximum likelihood method based on Le and Gascuel model [9]. The tree with the highest log likelihood (−2026.7976) is shown. Initial trees for the heuristic search were obtained automatically by applying the Neighbor-Joining and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using a JTT model and then selecting the topology with the superior log likelihood value. A discrete gamma distribution was used to model evolutionary rate differences among sites (5 categories (+G, parameter = 2.4842)). The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths representing the number of substitutions per site. The analysis involved 16 amino acid sequences. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated. A total of 90 positions were present in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA7 [10].