Comment on "Population Size Does Not Influence Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity in Animals"

doi:10.1126/science.1132585

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Biology

Science 1 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5804, p. 1390
DOI: 10.1126/science.1132585

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Technical Comments

Comment on "Population Size Does Not Influence Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity in Animals"

Connie J. Mulligan¹^*, Andrew Kitchen¹ and Michael M. Miyamoto²

¹ Department of Anthropology, Box 103610, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA.
² Department of Zoology, Box 118525, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA.

Fig. 1. Arcsine square root plot of mean ${pi}$ _S versus H for eight orders of eutherian mammals (numbers of species are given in parentheses). A nearly identical relationship exists for mean ${pi}$ _T versus H ( ${tau}$ = 0.84, P < 0.005). Furthermore, our results are robust in that P remains <0.005 when three pairs of orders with nearly identical ${pi}$ or H diversities, i.e., Artiodactyla/Chiroptera, Carnivora/Insectivora, and Chiroptera/Primates are counted as ties in the Kendall tests. Individual ${pi}$ _S and ${pi}$ _T estimates for each species were based on the Nei-Gojobori method with a Jukes-Cantor correction and on the Kimura two-parameter distance with a gamma distribution ( ${alpha}$ = 0.5), respectively (7). Otherwise, our methods followed those of Bazin et al. (1). [View Larger Version of this Image (26K GIF file)]