53
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Incomplete taxon sampling is not a problem for phylogenetic inference.

      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
      Amino Acids, Animals, Computer Simulation, DNA, Evolution, Molecular, Humans, Phylogeny, Sequence Analysis, DNA

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          A major issue in all data collection for molecular phylogenetics is taxon sampling, which refers to the use of data from only a small representative set of species for inferring higher-level evolutionary history. Insufficient taxon sampling is often cited as a significant source of error in phylogenetic studies, and consequently, acquisition of large data sets is advocated. To test this assertion, we have conducted computer simulation studies by using natural collections of evolutionary parameters--rates of evolution, species sampling, and gene lengths--determined from data available in genomic databases. A comparison of the true tree with trees constructed by using taxa subsamples and trees constructed by using all taxa shows that the amount of phylogenetic error per internal branch is similar; a result that holds true for the neighbor-joining, minimum evolution, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood methods. Furthermore, our results show that even though trees inferred by using progressively larger taxa subsamples of a real data set become increasingly similar to trees inferred by using the full sample, all inferred trees are equidistant from the true tree in terms of phylogenetic error per internal branch. Our results suggest that longer sequences, rather than extensive sampling, will better improve the accuracy of phylogenetic inference.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          11526218
          58547
          10.1073/pnas.191248498

          Chemistry
          Amino Acids,Animals,Computer Simulation,DNA,Evolution, Molecular,Humans,Phylogeny,Sequence Analysis, DNA

          Comments

          Comment on this article