"Introduction to Inferring Evolutionary Relationships". In: Current

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Introduction to Inferring Evolutionary UNIT 6.1 Relationships Much of bioinformatics is essentially comparative biology. Inferences based on compari- sons between entities such as motifs, sequences, genomes, and molecular structures are made. Given that living organisms and their constituent components have an evolutionary history, phylogeny properly lies at the heart of comparative biology (Harvey and Pagel, 1991). Increasingly, researchers in bioinformatics are realizing that phylogeny-based comparisons can yield important insights that can be missed using other techniques (Eisen, 1998; Rehmsmeier and Vingron, 2001). For example, a knowledge of phylogeny is vital in determining whether a set of sequences are orthologous or paralogous (Page and Charleston, 1997; Yuan et al., 1998; Storm and Sonnhammer, 2001; Zmasek and Eddy, 2001), which in turn has implications for predicting the function of a novel sequence (Eisen, 1998). Indeed, it is increasingly common for protein family databases to include gene phylogenies in addition to alignments. Examples include HOVERGEN (http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/databases/hovergen.html; Duret et al., 1994), SYSTERS (http://systers.molgen.mpg.de; Krause et al., 2000), and COPSE (http://copse.molgen. mpg.de). Phylogenetic analysis at the level of whole genomes poses new analytical challenges (Kim and Salisbury, 2001; Korbel et al., 2002; Wang et al., 2002), but promises new insights into genomic evolution. In some cases, the role of phylogeny might not be either obvious or explicit, so that many people may well have built phylogenetic trees without necessarily realizing it. The popular multiple sequence alignment program Clustal (UNIT 2.3) builds a phylogeny (the “guide tree”) every time it aligns sequences. Whereas Clustal constructs an initial tree to prioritize the order in which sequences are aligned, other methods infer the alignment and phylo- geny simultaneously (Hein, 1990; Phillips et al., 2000). Phylogenies also have a role to play in structural biology, especially in methods for predicting the secondary structure of RNA (Gulko and Haussler, 1996; Knudsen and Hein, 1999; Akmaev et al., 2000) and protein sequences (Li et al., 1998). Tree comparison techniques similar to those used to study host-parasite associations (Page and Charleston, 1998) have been used to tackle the problem of mapping cell-bound receptors onto the ligands to which they bind (Bafna et al., 2000). INTRODUCTION TO TREES This section introduces some basic phylogenetic terms and concepts. For a fuller discus- sion see recent textbooks such as Page and Holmes (1998) and Hall (2001). Tree Terminology A tree is a mathematical structure which is used to represent the evolutionary history of a group of sequences or organisms. This actual pattern of historical relationships is the phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, which we try to estimate. A tree consists of nodes connected by branches (also called edges). Terminal nodes (also called leaves, or terminal taxa) represent sequences or organisms for which we have data. Internal nodes represent hypothetical ancestors; the ancestor of all the sequences that comprise the tree is the root of the tree (Fig. 6.1.1). The nodes and branches of a tree may have various kinds of information associated with them. Some methods of phylogeny reconstruction (e.g., parsimony) endeavor to reconstruct the characters of each hypothetical ancestor; most Inferring methods also estimate the amount of evolution that takes place between each node on the Evolutionary Relationships Contributed by Roderic D.M. Page 6.1.1 Current Protocols in Bioinformatics (2003) 6.1.1-6.1.13 Copyright © 2003 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. human mouse fugu Drosophila leaf edge internal node root Figure 6.1.1 A phylogeny showing some basic tree terms. mouse fugu root human Drosophila human mouse fugu Drosophila time Figure 6.1.2 Unrooted and rooted trees for human, mouse, fugu and Drosophila. The rooted tree (bottom) is obtained by rooting the unrooted tree along the edge leading to Drosophila. tree, which can be represented as edge lengths (also called branch lengths). Nodes may also be labeled with various measures of support or confidence, such as bootstrap values or posterior probabilities (see below). Trees can be depicted as a diagram such as Figure 6.1.1 or in a shorthand form consisting of nested parentheses, such as (((human, mouse), fugu), Drosophila). UNIT 6.2 provides examples of different styles of tree drawing, and a detailed description of the nested parentheses notation. Rooted and Unrooted Trees Trees can either be rooted or unrooted. A rooted tree has a node identified as the root from which all other nodes ultimately descend; hence a rooted tree has direction. This direction corresponds to evolutionary time; the closer a node is to the root of the tree the older it is in time. Rooted trees allow us to define ancestor-descendant relationships between nodes—given a pair of nodes connected by a branch, the node closest to the root is the ancestor of the node further away from the root (the descendant). Unrooted trees lack a root, and hence do not specify evolutionary relationships in quite the same way, and they do not allow us to talk of ancestors and descendants. Furthermore, sequences that may be Introduction to adjacent on an unrooted tree need not be evolutionarily closely related. For example, given Inferring the unrooted tree in Figure 6.1.2, the fugu and Drosophila sequences are neighbors on the Evolutionary Relationships tree, yet the fugu is a fish and is is more closely related to humans and mice than to the 6.1.2 Current Protocols in Bioinformatics mouse Drosophila human 2 fugu 1 3 mouse fugu 4 human human 5 12Drosophila mouse fugu Drosophila Drosophila 34fugu Figure 6.1.3 Each of the rooted trees 1 to 5 corresponds to placing the root on the corresponding numbered human edge of the unrooted tree. human mouse fruit fly. This is because theThe root five of rooted the tree trees lies that on canthe branchbe derived leading fromhum antoa unrootedn tree for four sequences. we placed the root elsewhere, say on the branch leading to the mouse, then the fugu and mouse Drosophila mouse on any one of the five edges in the unrooted tree; hence, this unrooted tree corresponds Drosophila to a set of five rooted trees (Fig. 6.1.3). fugu fugu The distinction between sequences rooted and would unrooted indeed trees be is closely important related. because In fact, most we methods could place for the root Drosophila reconstructing phylogenies reconstruct unrooted trees, and hence cannot distinguish5 among the five trees shown in Figure 6.1.3 on the basis of the data alone. In order to root an unrooted tree (i.e., decide which of the five trees is the actual evolutionary tree), we need some other source of information. Rooting Trees Unrooted trees can be converted into rooted trees using a number of methods (Fig. 6.1.4). The most common is the use of an “outgroup.” An outgroup is one or more sequences thought to lie outside the sequences of interest (the “ingroup”). For example, given the three vertebrate sequences from human, mouse, and fugu, we could use the invertebrate Drosophila then other methods must be used. Midpoint rooting (Fig. 6.1.4B) places the root halfway along the longest path in the tree. This makes an implicit assumption that the rate of to root the tree (Fig. 6.1.4A). If we are unsure of the identity of the outgroup, Current Protocols in Bioinformatics Drosophila . Had Inferring Evolutionary Relationships 6.1.3 A outgroup fugu mouse Drosophilafugu mouse human Drosophila human B midpoint fugu 3 mouse Drosophilafugu mouse human 1 11 1 2 3 4 2 5 human 1 Drosophila C gene duplication α β α β human-α human-β fugu- human-fugu- human- fuga-α fuga-β Figure 6.1.4 Three different methods of rooting an unrooted tree. Outgroup rooting places the root between the outgroup (in this example Drosophila) and the ingroup (fugu, mouse, human). Midpoint rooting places the root at the midpoint of the longest path in the tree. Gene duplication rooting places the root between paralogous gene copies. evolution among the sequences has been broadly constant over time (a “molecular clock”). If the sequences come from a gene family that has undergone a gene duplication resulting in paralogous copies (see below), then the root can be placed between those copies. In Figure 6.1.4C, the root is placed between the α and β copies in humans and fugu. In large gene families where multiple gene duplications have taken place, the gene tree can be rooted at the position requiring the least number of gene duplications (Iwabe et al., 1989). Gene Trees and Species Trees There are a number of processes by which gene phylogeny can depart from species phylogeny. One of the most important is gene duplication, which can result in a species containing a number of distinct but related sequences. In the example shown in Figure 6.1.5, fugu, mice, and humans each have two copies of the same gene, α and β. A phylogeny for all six genes allows us to correctly recover the organismal phylogeny ((human, mouse), fugu) from either the α or β genes. However, if we are unfortunate enough to sequence only genes 1, 3, and 5, and are unaware that they are part of a larger gene tree, we would infer that the organismal tree was ((human, fugu), mouse). This is because gene 3 from humans is more closely related to gene 1 from fugu than is gene 5 from mouse, even though humans and mice are more closely related to each other than either is to the fugu. Introduction to Inferring Two homologous genes are orthologous if their most recent common ancestor did not Evolutionary Relationships undergo a gene duplication; otherwise they are termed paralogous (Fitch, 1970).
Recommended publications
  • Ade4: Analysis of Ecological Data: Exploratory and Euclidean Methods
    Package ‘ade4’ September 16, 2021 Version 1.7-18 Title Analysis of Ecological Data: Exploratory and Euclidean Methods in Environmental Sciences Author Stéphane Dray <[email protected]>, Anne-Béatrice Du- four <[email protected]>, and Jean Thioulouse <[email protected]>, with con- tributions from Thibaut Jombart, Sandrine Pavoine, Jean R. Lobry, Sébastien Ollier, Daniel Bor- card, Pierre Legendre, Stéphanie Bougeard and Aurélie Siberchicot. Based on ear- lier work by Daniel Chessel. Maintainer Aurélie Siberchicot <[email protected]> Depends R (>= 2.10) Imports graphics, grDevices, methods, stats, utils, MASS, pixmap, sp Suggests ade4TkGUI, adegraphics, adephylo, ape, CircStats, deldir, lattice, spdep, splancs, waveslim, progress, foreach, parallel, doParallel, iterators Description Tools for multivariate data analysis. Several methods are provided for the analy- sis (i.e., ordination) of one-table (e.g., principal component analysis, correspondence analy- sis), two-table (e.g., coinertia analysis, redundancy analysis), three-table (e.g., RLQ analy- sis) and K-table (e.g., STATIS, multiple coinertia analysis). The philosophy of the package is de- scribed in Dray and Dufour (2007) <doi:10.18637/jss.v022.i04>. License GPL (>= 2) URL http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/ADE-4/ BugReports https://github.com/sdray/ade4/issues Encoding UTF-8 NeedsCompilation yes Repository CRAN Date/Publication 2021-09-16 11:30:02 UTC R topics documented: ade4-package . .8 1 2 R topics documented: abouheif.eg . .8 acacia . .9 add.scatter . 10 aminoacyl . 13 amova............................................ 14 apis108 . 15 apqe............................................. 16 aravo............................................. 17 ardeche . 18 area.plot . 19 arrival............................................ 21 as.taxo . 22 atlas .
    [Show full text]
  • Romanesco Documentation Release 0.1.0
    Romanesco Documentation Release 0.1.0 Kitware, Inc. January 27, 2016 Contents 1 What is Romanesco? 1 1.1 Installation................................................1 1.2 Configuration...............................................1 1.3 Types and formats............................................2 1.4 API documentation............................................5 1.5 Developer documentation........................................ 11 1.6 Plugins.................................................. 13 2 Indices and tables 17 Python Module Index 19 i ii CHAPTER 1 What is Romanesco? Romanesco is a python application for generic task execution. It can be run within a celery worker to provide a distributed batch job execution platform. The application can run tasks in a variety of languages and environments, including python, R, spark, and docker, all via a single python or celery broker interface. Tasks can be chained together into workflows, and these workflows can actually span multiple languages and environments seamlessly. Data flowing between tasks can be automatically converted into a format understandable in the target environment. For example, a python object from a python task can be automatically converted into an R object for an R task at the next stage of a pipeline. Romanesco defines a specification that prescribes a loose coupling between a task and its runtime inputs and outputs. That specification is described in the API documentation section. This specification is language-independent and instances of the spec are best represented by a hierarchical data format such as JSON or YAML, or an equivalent serializable type such as a dict in python. Romanesco is designed to be easily extended to new languages and environments, or to support new data types and formats, or modes of data transfer.
    [Show full text]
  • Tutorial: Environment for Tree Exploration Release 3.0.0B7
    Tutorial: Environment for Tree Exploration Release 3.0.0b7 Jaime Huerta-Cepas November 25, 2015 Contents 1 Changelog history3 1.1 What’s new in ETE 2.3...................................3 1.2 What’s new in ETE 2.2...................................5 1.3 What’s new in ETE 2.1...................................9 2 The ETE tutorial 13 2.1 Working With Tree Data Structures............................ 13 2.2 The Programmable Tree Drawing Engine......................... 43 2.3 Phylogenetic Trees..................................... 64 2.4 Clustering Trees...................................... 80 2.5 Phylogenetic XML standards............................... 85 2.6 Interactive web tree visualization............................. 93 2.7 Testing Evolutionary Hypothesis.............................. 95 2.8 Dealing with the NCBI Taxonomy database........................ 105 2.9 SCRIPTS: orthoXML................................... 108 3 ETE’s Reference Guide 115 3.1 Master Tree class...................................... 115 3.2 Treeview module...................................... 127 3.3 PhyloTree class....................................... 138 3.4 Clustering module..................................... 141 3.5 Nexml module....................................... 142 3.6 Phyloxml Module..................................... 158 3.7 Seqgroup class....................................... 161 3.8 WebTreeApplication object................................ 161 3.9 EvolTree class....................................... 162 3.10 NCBITaxa class.....................................
    [Show full text]
  • User Manual for Splitstree4 V4.6
    User Manual for SplitsTree4 V4.6 Daniel H. Huson and David Bryant August 4, 2006 Contents Contents 1 1 Introduction 4 2 Getting Started 5 3 Obtaining and Installing the Program 5 4 Program Overview 6 5 Splits, Trees and Networks 7 6 Opening, Reading and Writing Files 10 7 Estimating Distances 10 1 8 Building and Processing Trees 11 9 Building and Drawing Networks 11 10 Main Window 12 10.1 Network Tab ........................................ 13 10.2 Data Tab .......................................... 13 10.3 Source Tab ......................................... 13 10.4 Tool bar ........................................... 13 11 Graphical Interaction with the Network 13 12 Main Menus 14 12.1 File Menu .......................................... 14 12.2 Edit Menu .......................................... 16 12.3 View Menu ......................................... 16 12.4 Data Menu ......................................... 17 12.5 Distances Menu ....................................... 19 12.6 Trees Menu ......................................... 19 12.7 Network Menu ....................................... 20 12.8 Analysis Menu ....................................... 21 12.9 Draw Menu ......................................... 21 12.10Window Menu ....................................... 22 12.11Configuring Methods .................................... 23 13 Popup Menus 23 14 Tool Bar 24 15 Pipeline Window 24 15.1 Taxa Tab .......................................... 25 15.2 Unaligned Tab ....................................... 25 15.3 Characters Tab
    [Show full text]
  • Load-Balance and Fault-Tolerance for Massively Parallel Phylogenetic Inference
    Load-Balance and Fault-Tolerance for Massively Parallel Phylogenetic Inference Master’s Thesis of Klaus Lukas Hübner at the Department of Informatics Institute of Theoretical Informatics, Algorithmics II Reviewer: Prof. Dr. Alexandros Stamatakis Second reviewer: Prof. Dr. Peter Sanders Advisor: Dr. Alexey Kozlov Second advisor: M.Sc. Demian Hespe 01 January 2020 – 30 June 2020 Abstract Upcoming exascale supercomputers will comprise hundreds of thousands of CPUs. Scientic applications on these supercomputers will face two major challenges: Hardware failures, and parallelization eciency. We extend RAxML-ng, a widely used tool to build phylogenetic trees, to mitigate hardware failures without user intervention. For this, we increase the checkpointing frequency. We also detect failures, redistribute the work among the surviving ranks, restore a consistent search state, and restart the tree search automatically. RAxML-ng now supports fault tolerance in the tree search mode, using multiple starting trees, and multiple alignment data partitions. RAxML-ng can handle multiple failures at once as well as multiple successive failures. There is no limit on the number of failures that can occur simultaneously or sequentially. We also support mitigating failures which occur during the recovery of a previous failure or during checkpointing. In contrast to the previously available manual recovery scheme, a recovery is initiated automatically after a failure, that is, the user does not have to take any action. We benchmark our algorithms for checkpointing and recovery. In our experiments, creating a checkpoint of the model parameters requires at most 72.0 ± 0.9 ms (400 ranks, 4,116 partitions). Creating a checkpoint of the tree topology requires at most 0.575 ± 0.006 ms (1,879 taxa).
    [Show full text]
  • Efficient Coalescent Simulation and Genealogical Analysis for Large Sample Sizes
    RESEARCH ARTICLE Efficient Coalescent Simulation and Genealogical Analysis for Large Sample Sizes Jerome Kelleher1*, Alison M Etheridge2, Gilean McVean1,2,3 1 Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 3 Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom * [email protected] Abstract A central challenge in the analysis of genetic variation is to provide realistic genome simula- tion across millions of samples. Present day coalescent simulations do not scale well, or use approximations that fail to capture important long-range linkage properties. Analysing the results of simulations also presents a substantial challenge, as current methods to store OPEN ACCESS genealogies consume a great deal of space, are slow to parse and do not take advantage of Citation: Kelleher J, Etheridge AM, McVean G shared structure in correlated trees. We solve these problems by introducing sparse trees (2016) Efficient Coalescent Simulation and Genealogical Analysis for Large Sample Sizes. PLoS and coalescence records as the key units of genealogical analysis. Using these tools, exact Comput Biol 12(5): e1004842. doi:10.1371/journal. simulation of the coalescent with recombination for chromosome-sized regions over hun- pcbi.1004842 dreds of thousands of samples is possible, and substantially faster than present-day Editor: Yun S. Song, UC Berkeley, UNITED STATES approximate methods. We can also analyse the results orders of magnitude more quickly Received: December 10, 2015 than with existing methods. Accepted: March 2, 2016 Published: May 4, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Kelleher et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Tutorial: Environment for Tree Exploration Release 2.3.6
    Tutorial: Environment for Tree Exploration Release 2.3.6 Jaime Huerta-Cepas August 11, 2015 Contents 1 Changelog history3 1.1 What’s new in ETE 2.3...................................3 1.2 What’s new in ETE 2.2...................................5 1.3 What’s new in ETE 2.1...................................9 2 The ETE tutorial 13 2.1 Working With Tree Data Structures............................ 13 2.2 The Programmable Tree Drawing Engine......................... 43 2.3 Phylogenetic Trees..................................... 63 2.4 Clustering Trees...................................... 80 2.5 Phylogenetic XML standards............................... 85 2.6 Interactive web tree visualization............................. 92 2.7 Testing Evolutionary Hypothesis.............................. 94 2.8 Dealing with the NCBI Taxonomy database........................ 104 2.9 SCRIPTS: orthoXML................................... 108 3 ETE’s Reference Guide 115 3.1 Master Tree class...................................... 115 3.2 Treeview module...................................... 127 3.3 PhyloTree class....................................... 137 3.4 Clustering module..................................... 140 3.5 Nexml module....................................... 142 3.6 Phyloxml Module..................................... 157 3.7 Seqgroup class....................................... 160 3.8 WebTreeApplication object................................ 161 3.9 EvolTree class....................................... 161 3.10 NCBITaxa class.....................................
    [Show full text]
  • Rutger Aldo Vos Doctorandus, Universiteit Van Amsterdam, 2000 THESIS SUBMITTED in PARTIAL FULFILLMENT of the REQUIREMENTS for TH
    Rutger Aldo Vos Doctorandus, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2000 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Biological Sciences 0Rutger Aldo Vos, 2006 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Summer, 2006 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name: Rutger Aldo Vos Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title of Thesis: Inferring large phylogenies: The big tree problem Examining Committee: Chair: Dr. H. Hutter, Associate Professor Dr. A. Mooers, Assistant Professor, Senior Supervisor Department of Biological Sciences, S.F.U. Dr. W. Maddison, Professor Departments of Zoology and Botany, University of British Columbia Dr. B. Crespi, Professor Department of Biological Sciences, S.F.U. Dr. S. Graham, Assistant Professor Botanical Garden & Centre for Plant Research, and Department of Botany, University of British Columbia Public Examiner Dr. R. Page, Professor Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, University of Glasgow External Examiner 12 May 2006 Date Approved SIMON FRASER UNI~ER~IW~~brary DECLARATION OF PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENCE The author, whose copyright is declared on the title page of this work, has granted to Simon Fraser University the right to lend this thesis, project or extended essay to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. The author has further granted permission to Simon Fraser University to keep or make a digital copy for use in its circulating collection, and, without changing the content, to translate the thesislproject or extended essays, if technically possible, to any medium or format for the purpose of preservation of the digital work.
    [Show full text]
  • Preview Software Manual (PDF)
    BioGrapher Version 4.21 BETA for WinXP and Mac OS 10.5 (Workbook for Excel 2003, 2004, 2007) May 29, 2008 Excel spreadsheet design, features, and macros in the workbook copyright © 2003- 2008 by Rama Viswanathan ([email protected]). *****USE AT YOUR OWN RISK**** ------>PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ THE "READ ME FIRST FOR INSTALL" DOCUMENT FOR INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS AND KNOWN ISSUES--GraphViz calls will not work and graphs will not be drawn unless the GraphViz packages are installed in the right locations in the directory tree! All the files and executables needed by BioGrapher (including the AT&T GraphViz binaries) for WinXP/PC are now placed in a single self-contained BioGrapher FOLDER. In general, this folder should have been placed in a directory for which the user has full access (including write) privileges. BioGrapher works well off a flash drive. However, on a Mac running OS 10.5, the latest version 2.18 of the AT&T GraphViz package must have been installed (done when the BioGrapher installer script is executed), and this installation places the GraphViz binaries in /usr/local/bin and uses Mac system libraries (including XCODE libraries) in /usr/lib. It is also possible to use a special version of the BioGrapher software for older Mac OS (10.3.9 through 10.4.x) if you are able to download and access the older 2.16 version of GraphViz. See installation instructions for details. ----->This workbook uses MACROS, whose use MUST be enabled via the standard TOOLS--->MACRO--->SECURITY Excel menu item in Excel 2003 (or in Excel 2007 through the menu bar/ribbon alert that is displayed) when the workbook is first launched.
    [Show full text]
  • User Manual for Splitstree4 V4.17.1
    User Manual for SplitsTree4 V4.17.1 Daniel H. Huson and David Bryant June 28, 2021 Contents Contents 1 1 Introduction 4 2 Getting Started 5 3 Obtaining and Installing the Program5 4 Program Overview5 5 Splits, Trees and Networks7 6 Opening, Reading and Writing Files9 7 Estimating Distances9 8 Building and Processing Trees 10 9 Building and Drawing Networks 11 10 Main Window 11 1 10.1 Network Tab........................................ 11 10.2 Data Tab.......................................... 12 10.3 Tool bar........................................... 12 11 Graphical Interaction with the Network 12 12 Main Menus 13 12.1 File Menu.......................................... 13 12.2 Edit Menu.......................................... 14 12.3 View Menu......................................... 15 12.4 Data Menu......................................... 16 12.5 Distances Menu....................................... 17 12.6 Trees Menu......................................... 18 12.7 Network Menu....................................... 18 12.8 Analysis Menu....................................... 19 12.9 Draw Menu......................................... 20 12.10Window Menu....................................... 21 12.11Help Menu......................................... 21 12.12Configuring Methods.................................... 22 13 Popup Menus 22 14 Tool Bar 23 15 Data Entry Dialog 23 16 Pipeline Window 23 16.1 Taxa Tab.......................................... 24 16.2 Unaligned Tab....................................... 24 16.3 Characters Tab......................................
    [Show full text]
  • Reconciliation of Gene and Species Trees with Polytomies
    Vol. 00 no. 00 2011 Doc-StartReconciliationBIOINFORMATICS of Gene and Species Trees With Pages 1–10 Polytomies Yu Zheng 1, Taoyang Wu 1, Louxin Zhang 1 ∗ 1Department of Mathematics, Nat’l University of Singapore, 10 Lower Kent Ridge, S’pore 119076 Received on XXXXX; revised on XXXXX; accepted on XXXXX Associate Editor: XXXXXXX ABSTRACT neofunctionalization. Ortholog identification is the first task of Motivation: Millions of genes in the modern species belong to only almost every comparative genomic study since orthologs are used thousands of gene families. Genes duplicate and are lost during to infer the pattern of gene gain and loss, the mode of signaling evolution. A gene family includes instances of the same gene in pathway evolution, and the correspondence between genotype and different species and duplicate genes in the same species. Two phenotype. genes in different species are ortholog if their common ancestor lies Genes are gained through duplication and horizontal gene transfer in the most recent common ancestor of the species. Because of and lost via deletion and pesudogenization throughout evolution. complex gene evolutionary history, ortholog identification is a basic Identifying orthologs is essentially to find out how genes evolved. but difficult task in comparative genomics. A key method for the task Since past evolutionary events cannot be observed directly, we is to use an explicit model of the evolutionary history of the genes have to infer these events from the gene sequences available today. being studied, called the gene (family) tree. It compares the gene Therefore, ortholog identification is never an easy task. tree with the evolutionary history of the species in which the genes A key method for ortholog identification is to use an explicit reside, called the species tree, using the procedure known as tree model of the evolutionary history of the genes subject to study, in reconciliation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Biological Object Notation (BON): a Structured Fle Format for Biological Data Received: 19 January 2018 Jan P
    www.nature.com/scientificreports OPEN The Biological Object Notation (BON): a structured fle format for biological data Received: 19 January 2018 Jan P. Buchmann 1, Mathieu Fourment2 & Edward C. Holmes 1 Accepted: 13 June 2018 The large size and high complexity of biological data can represent a major methodological challenge Published: xx xx xxxx for the analysis and exchange of data sets between computers and applications. There has also been a substantial increase in the amount of metadata associated with biological data sets, which is being increasingly incorporated into existing data formats. Despite the existence of structured formats based on XML, biological data sets are mainly formatted using unstructured fle formats, and the incorporation of metadata results in increasingly complex parsing routines such that they become more error prone. To overcome these problems, we present the “biological object notation” (BON) format, a new way to exchange and parse nearly all biological data sets more efciently and with less error than other currently available formats. Based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), BON simplifes parsing by clearly separating the biological data from its metadata and reduces complexity compared to XML based formats. The ability to selectively compress data up to 87% compared to other fle formats and the reduced complexity results in improved transfer times and less error prone applications. Biological data, which includes, but is not limited to molecular sequences, annotations and phylogenetic trees, are still predominantly exchanged as fat fles or in line-based formats despite the existence of more structured fle notations that are better suited to complex data.
    [Show full text]