α and β Chains of the major haemoglobin and a note on the minor component of Tarsius
| Autor: | J. M. Beard, N. A. Barnicot, D. Hewett-Emmett |
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| Rok vydání: | 1976 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Nature. 259:338-341 |
| ISSN: | 1476-4687 0028-0836 |
| DOI: | 10.1038/259338a0 |
| Popis: | THE position of Tarsias (the tarsier) in the evolution of the primates has long been controversial. Gadow1 placed it in a separate suborder, but Pocock2 allied it with the monkeys, apes and man in the Haplorhini, assigning the lemurs, lorisoids and tree shrews to the Strepsirhini. This was accepted by Hill3 but Simpson4 divided the primates into two suborders, Anthropoidea and Prosimii, placing Tarsius in the latter together with lemurs, lorisoids and tree shrews, though as a separate infraorder. The problem arises because of resemblances between Tarsius and the anthropoids. These include the absence of a rhinarium, a retinal structure similar to the anthropoid fovea and a haemo-chorial placenta, compared with the epitheliochorial form of prosimians, Tarsius is often regarded as a ‘living fossil’, implying that little evolution has taken place since its divergence from the other primates. The problem may be solved with the aid of data on the primary structure of mammalian proteins5: there is sufficient evidence about haemoglobin, for example, to construct a hypothetical ancestral primate sequence5–7. Using two samples of blood from T. bancanus collected during the past 3 yr, we have determined the α and β Hb chain sequences and found that, at the molecular level, Tarsius is not a ‘living fossil’ and that the most parsimonius globin trees cluster Tarsius with the anthropoids and not the prosimians, lending support to the Haplorhini-Strepsirhini classification2,3. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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