Colobinae is a subfamily of the Old World monkey family. It consists of 10 genera in two subtribes, namely the African Colobinae (including genera Colobus, Piliocolobus, and Procolobus) and the Asian Colobinae (including genera Pygathrix, Rhinopithecus, Nasalis, Simias, Presbytis, Trachypithecus, and Semnopithecus). The phylogenetic relationships among the Asian and African colobine genera have been a controversial issue and not yet well established.
In order to clarify their relationships, researchers from Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (KIZ) revisited the relationships within the Asian and African Colobinae by analyzing 44 nuclear non-coding genes (>23 kb) and mitochondrial (mt) genome sequences from 14 colobine and 4 non-colobine primates.
The nuclear data analysis shows that Semnopithecus and Trachypithecus is a sister group, and the same to Presbytis and the odd-nosed monkey that includes Rhinopithecus, Pygathrix and Nasalis. The mt genome data analysis reveals that Semnopithecus diverges earliest among the Asian colobines and that the odd-nosed monkey group is sister to a Presbytis and Trachypithecus clade. It also suggests a closer relationship between Pygathrix with Nasalis within the odd-nosed monkey genera.

Another remarkable finding of the study is that all of these analyses reject the recently proposed African colobine paraphyly and hybridization hypothesis, and support reciprocal monophyly of the African and Asian groups.

The research results have been published in PLOS ONE. (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036274)