The phylogenetic position of Acoela as revealed by the complete mitochondrial genome of Symsagittifera roscoffensis

Note from the authors

Lars Podsiadlowski   (2010-11-12 11:26)  Universität Bonn

After publication of our manuscript in a preliminary form, it was brought to our attention that there is good evidence that the partial mitogenomic sequence assigned in GenBank to Nemertoderma westbladi (Nemertodermatida, GenBank AY228758) is in fact a mollusc sequence, likely due to DNA contamination presumably not detected by the authors of the original paper. To our knowledge this contamination has not been made public yet, nor has the GenBank accession been removed or amended; this task does not fall among our responsibilities. Nevertheless, we are concerned that inclusion of a partial and long-branched molluscan mitogenomic sequence has had effects on the phylogenetic analyses we performed, thus questioning the phylogenetic implications made in the publication at hand. We will soon critically evaluate the effects of taxon sampling and model selection on the phylogenetic position of acoels in a follow-up manuscript.
Lars Podsiadlowski (on behalf of all authors)

Competing interests

None declared

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