Molecular phylogeny

From Palaeos

Due to the development of advanced sequencing techniques in molecular biology, it has become feasible to gather large amounts of data (DNA or amino acid sequences) to estimate phylogenies. For example, it is not rare to find studies with character matrices based on whole mitochondrial genomes. However, it has been proposed that it is more important to increase the number of taxa in the matrix than to increase the number of characters, because the more taxa, the more robust is the resulting phylogeny. This is partly due to the breaking up of long branches. It has been argued that this is an important reason to incorporate data from fossils into phylogenies where possible.

Using simulations, Zwickl and Hillis [1] found that increasing taxon sampling in phylogenetic inference has a positive effect on the accuracy of phylogenetic analyses.

[edit] Reference

[1] Zwickl, DJ, Hillis DM (2002). "Increased taxon sampling greatly reduces phylogenetic error". Systematic Biology 51: 588-598.

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