Molecular systematics of basal subfamilies of ants using 28S rRNA (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Published by and copyright of Elsevier. The definitive edition is available at http://www.journals.elsevier.com/molecular-phylogenetics-and-evolution/.For many years, the ant subfamily Ponerinae was hypothesized to contain the basal (early branching) lineages of ants. Recently the\ud Ponerinae were reclassiWed into six poneromorph subfamilies based on morphological analysis. We evaluate this new poneromorph classiWcation\ud using 1240 base pairs of DNA sequence data obtained from 28S rRNA gene sequences of 68 terminal taxa. The molecular tree\ud supported the monophyly of the ant family Formicidae, with 100% parsimony bootstrap (PB) support and posterior probabilities (PP) of\ud 1.00, with the ant subfamily Leptanillinae as a sister group to all other ants (PBD62, PPD93). However, our analyses strongly support\ud the polyphyly of the Poneromorph subfamilies (sensu Bolton). The Ectatomminae and Heteroponerinae are more closely related to the\ud Formicoid subfamilies than to the rest of the poneromophs (PBD96, PPD100). The Amblyoponinae (PBD52, PPD96), Paraponerinae\ud (PBD100, PPD100), Ponerinae (PB