Xenacoelomorpha is the sister group to Nephrozoa

@article{Cannon2016XenacoelomorphaIT,
  title={Xenacoelomorpha is the sister group to Nephrozoa},
  author={Johanna Cannon and Bruno C. Vellutini and Julian Smith and Fredrik Ronquist and Ulf Jondelius and Andreas Hejnol},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2016},
  volume={530},
  pages={89-93}
}
The position of Xenacoelomorpha in the tree of life remains a major unresolved question in the study of deep animal relationships. [] Key Result Here we show robust phylogenomic support for Xenacoelomorpha as the sister taxon of Nephrozoa. Our phylogenetic analyses, based on 11 novel xenacoelomorph transcriptomes and using different models of evolution under maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference analyses, strongly corroborate this result.
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264 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
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264 Citations

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What has been learned over the last decades on the morphology, genomics and phylogenetic relationships of the Xenacoelomorpha is revisited.

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Results from the decoded genome of the acoel Praesagittifera naikaiensis and reported xenacoelomorph Hox genes revealed that acoels share a peptide NLK(S/T)MSQ(V/I)D, which starts immediately after the homeodomain sequence of the central Hox4/5/6.

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Analysis of 18S rDNA metabarcoding data from three marine projects covering benthic and pelagic habitats worldwide shows that acoels have a greater richness in planktonic environments than previously described, and identifies a putative novel clade in the deep benthos that branches as sister group to the rest of Acoela, thus representing the earliest-branching acoel clade.

Phylogeny: A home for Xenoturbella

Four new deep-sea species of Xenoturbella are added from the eastern Pacific Ocean to the two already known from the Atlantic, and phylogenetic analysis aligns them at the base of the Protostomia or even as basal bilaterians.

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Comparison with the other marine invertebrate larvae suggests that the morphologically simple swimming larvae described in Xenoturbella represent an ancestral larval type of all metazoans and bilaterians.

Filtering artifactual signal increases support for Xenacoelomorpha and Ambulacraria sister relationship in the animal tree of life

The slow evolving genome of the xenacoelomorph worm Xenoturbella bocki

The data do not provide evidence supporting the idea that Xenacoelomorpha are a primitively simple outgroup to other bilaterians and gene presence/absence data support a relationship with Ambulacraria, but it is concluded that X. bocki has a complex genome typical of bilateralians, in contrast to the apparent simplicity of its body plan.
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