| dc.description.abstract |
Approaches to reconstruct phylogenies abound and are widely used in the study of molecular
evolution. Partially through extensive simulations, we are beginning to understand the potential pitfalls as
well as the advantages of different methods. However, little work has been done on possible biases
introduced by the methods if the input data are random and do not carry any phylogenetic signal. Although
Tree-Puzzle (Strimmer K, von Haeseler A. 1996. Quartet puzzling: a quartet maximum-likelihood method
for reconstructing tree topologies. Mol Biol Evol. 13:964-969; Schmidt HA, Strimmer K, Vingron M, von
Haeseler A. 2002. Tree-Puzzle: maximum likelihood phylogenetic analysis using quartets and parallel
computing. Bioinformatics 18:502-504) has become common in phylogenetics, the resulting distribution of
labeled unrooted bifurcating trees when data do not carry any phylogenetic signal has not been investigated.
Our note shows that the distribution converges to the well-known Yule-Harding distribution. However, the
bias of the Yule-Harding distribution will be diminished by a tiny amount of phylogenetic information.
maximum likelihood, phylogenetic reconstruction, Tree-Puzzle, tree distribution, Yule-Harding distribution.
?? 2010 The Author. |
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