| Abstract Detail
Systematics Section / ASPT Simmons, Mark P. [1], Müller, Kai [2], Webb, Colleen T. [3]. The deterministic effects of alignment methods to phylogenetic inference. Alignment of nucleotide and/or amino acid sequences is a fundamental component of sequence-based molecular phylogenetic studies. Most comparisons of alignment programs have focused on how the inferred alignments compared with “known” alignments. In this study, however, our focus was on how different alignment methods affect the gene trees that are inferred from the alignments. We used simulations to determine how alignment errors can lead to systematic biases that affect phylogenetic inference from those sequences. We compared four alternative approaches to sequence alignment: progressive pairwise alignment, as implemented in Clustal W and MUSCLE; simultaneous multiple alignment of sequence fragments, as implemented in DCA; local pairwise alignment, as implemented in DIALIGN 2 and DIALIGN-T; and direct optimization, as implemented in POY. We set out to address three questions in this study. First, when only a single process partition is simulated, how accurately do the gene trees derived from the inferred alignments reconstruct the simulated tree topology? How do they compare to the gene tree derived from the correct alignment? Second, when different process partitions that have different histories are aligned and phylogenetically analyzed together, how congruent are the gene trees derived from the inferred alignments with the tree topology for the process partition with the greatest number of characters? Are they more or less congruent than the gene tree derived from the correct alignment? Third, when sequences without any insertions or deletions are simulated, how many gapped positions are incorrectly inserted by the different alignment methods?
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1 - Colorado State University, Department of Biology, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80523-1878, USA
2 - Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Nees-Institut für Biodiversität der Pflanzen, Meckenheimer Allee 170, Bonn, D-53115, Germany
3 - Colorado State University, Department of Biology, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80523-1878, U.S.A.
Keywords:
alignment
molecular phylogenetics
progressive pairwise alignment
simultaneous alignment
direct optimization
gene-tree inference.
Presentation Type: Oral Paper:Papers for Sections
Session: CP24
Location: Continental C/Hilton
Date: Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Time: 9:15 AM
Number: CP24006
Abstract ID:1073 |
