Abstracts - Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft

20 Key Lectures of the Symposiature of the coelome and nephridia to neuroanatomy. My focus will be on those projects involved in“Neurophylogeny”, an emerging discipline that explores structure and development of the nervoussystem in order to contribute characters that may be useful for phylogenetic reconstructions.S ZS.2 (Mo) - ENNew insights into protostome phylogeny: What shall we expect from the“postgenomic era”?Christoph BleidornEvolutionsbiologie/Spezielle Zoologie, Universität PotsdamTraditionally, single- or low copy number genes have been used for inferring phylogenetic relationships.It has become clear, however, that a gene tree does not necessarily correspond to a speciestree, and that gene trees often disagree with one another. Sequencing of EST-libraries and completegenomes of representative of most major lineages of Protostomia raised the hope to resolve largescalerelationships within this taxon. Contrary to initial hopes, it has become clear that increasingthe amount of genes analysed does not overcome incongruence. Instead, phylogenomic analysesoften reveal highly conflicting data within datasets. Reviewing current phylogenomic analyses ofprotostome relationships, it can be shown that interesting findings recovered in analyses of the 18SrRNA gene (e.g. monophyly of Ecdysozoa and Lophotrochozoa, placement of Echiura wihin Annelida)or revealed by mitochondrial data (e.g. inclusion of Sipuncula within annelids) are corroboratedby large datasets. However, it becomes clear that the grouping of many problematic taxa (Bryozoa,Gastrotricha, Myzostomida, etc.) remains unclear. Possible reasons why genes within such largedatasets reveal incongruent phylogenies will be discussed. I will give an outlook, how analyses of sofar rarely used markers (e.g. intron-positions), and application of largely unexplored methods, whichwill be able to include a bigger fraction of the available data (e.g. gene tree parsimony), can be usedto improve deep metazoan phylogeny.