Anoles on Genbank

With the recent sequencing of the Anolis carolinensis genome and Thom’s recent post on resources for other anole species I got to wondering how many DNA sequences are available for anoles?  In an effort to answer this question, I searched for DNA sequence data from Anolis and other genera now considered part of Anolis (Norops, Chamaeleolis, Chamaelinorops, and Phenacosaurus) on the NCBI’s popular GenBank database.  I found that Genbank‘s nucleotide database contains over 29,ooo unique anole sequences. Not surprisingly, the most sequence (25,973) are from A. carolinensis.  Remaining sequences are divided among 216 anole species. The top species after carolinensis are: krugi (433), distichus (378), sagrei (351) and cristatellus (328).  Is anyone else surprised by these totals?  I would have guessed sagrei would be second.  I think A. distichus will at least double in the next few years, partly because I’m doing lots of sequencing from this species myself.

Only 29 species are represented by more than 10 sequences and half of the 216 species represented in GenBank are represented by a single (usually mitochondrial) sequence. The availability of this data highlights our prospects for asking evolutionary and ecological questions across the rest of anoline diversity, but also highlights the huge amount of work ahead if we are interested in making broad genus-wide comparisons. Admittedly, Genebank lags behind current research as most of us only post sequences at the time of publication (we have hundreds of sequences to be added in the next few years).

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1 Comment

  1. I’m certainly surprised that krugi comes out ahead of sagrei. I also might have guessed that a mainland species other than A. carolinensis would have been on the list.

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