Rooted triple consensus and anomalous gene trees

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Anomalous gene trees (AGTs) are gene trees with a topology different from a species tree that are more probable to observe than congruent gene trees. In this paper we propose a rooted triple approach to finding the correct species tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schmidt Heiko A, Ebersberger Ingo, Ewing Gregory B, von Haeseler Arndt
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2008-04-01
Series:BMC Evolutionary Biology
Online Access:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/118
Description
Summary:<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Anomalous gene trees (AGTs) are gene trees with a topology different from a species tree that are more probable to observe than congruent gene trees. In this paper we propose a rooted triple approach to finding the correct species tree in the presence of AGTs.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Based on simulated data we show that our method outperforms the <it>extended majority rule consensus </it>strategy, while still resolving the species tree. Applying both methods to a metazoan data set of 216 genes, we tested whether AGTs substantially interfere with the reconstruction of the metazoan phylogeny.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Evidence of AGTs was not found in this data set, suggesting that erroneously reconstructed gene trees are the most significant challenge in the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships among species with current data. The new method does however rule out the erroneous reconstruction of deep or poorly resolved splits in the presence of lineage sorting.</p>
ISSN:1471-2148