A re-analysis of the molecular phylogeny of Lacertidae with currently available data

Abstract

The Lacertidae is one of the most diverse and widespread lizard families throughout Eurasia and Africa. Several studies so far have attempted to unravel the phylogeny of Lacertidae using morphological and molecular data. However, the intra-family relationships remain unclear. in an effort to explore the phylogenetic relationships within the family Lacertidae, a concatenated dataset of 5727 bp from six genes (two nuclear and four mitochondrial) and 40 genera was assembled based on GenBank database. Phylogenetic inference analyses were conducted using Maximum Parsimony (MP), Bayesian inference (BI) and Maximum Likelihood (ML), revealing that even a combined dataset of both mitochondrial and nuclear genes is not able to resolvethe phylogenetic relationships of the Lacertidae family under the tribe level.