Cladogram Lab Report

The goal of the first exercise in this experiment was to build a morphological cladogram for five-mammalian species. The five-mammalian species were the Domestic dog, Virginia opossum, Domestic horse, Domestic cat and White-tailed deer. The cladogram was constructed based on the species morphological features of their skulls as well as other characteristics. The outgroup was the lizard and the five-mammalian species were the ingroups. At the beginning of the experiment, each student needed to examine all the skulls for the five-mammalian species and collect data to construct a character matrix. After all the data was collected, a character matrix was created to help organize the evolutionary relationship between each species. For example, the domestic dog had a saggital keel but the virginia opossum had a saggital crest. Next, after completing the character matrix, a polarized character matrix was created to begin constructing the morphological diagram. The outgroup (lizard) was coded as zero for all the characters. If the other species had the same character state as the

Instead of using morphological characteristics to build a cladogram, the molecular cladogram was based on protein (cytochrome b) data. To collect the protein data for each species, the NCBI website was used. When searching proteins for the domestic horse around 11,000 different proteins were displayed but however to construct the cladogram, only the mitochondrial proteins were collected. The only record obtained was the “cytochrome b, partial (mitochondrion) [Equus caballus]” all with the same number of amino acids. For example, for the domestic horse, all the proteins had around 379 amino acids. The proteins needed to have the same number of amino acids to construct the cladogram. This process was repeated four more times since there were five-mammalian