Inferring polyploid phylogenies from multiply-labeled gene trees

• Main Authors: Petri Anna, Huber Katharina T, Spillner Andreas, Lott Martin, Oxelman Bengt, Moulton Vincent
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2009-08-01
• Series: BMC Evolutionary Biology
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/9/216

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Gene trees that arise in the context of reconstructing the evolutionary history of polyploid species are often multiply-labeled, that is, the same leaf label can occur several times in a single tree. This property considerably complicates the task of forming a consensus of a collection of such trees compared to usual phylogenetic trees.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We present a method for computing a consensus tree of multiply-labeled trees. As with the well-known greedy consensus tree approach for phylogenetic trees, our method first breaks the given collection of gene trees into a set of clusters. It then aims to insert these clusters one at a time into a tree, starting with the clusters that are supported by most of the gene trees. As the problem to decide whether a cluster can be inserted into a multiply-labeled tree is computationally hard, we have developed a heuristic method for solving this problem.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We illustrate the applicability of our method using two collections of trees for plants of the genus <it>Silene</it>, that involve several allopolyploids at different levels.</p>