Related papers: Inferring ancestral sequences in taxon-rich phylog…
In evolutionary biology, the speciation history of living organisms is represented graphically by a phylogeny, that is, a rooted tree whose leaves correspond to current species and branchings indicate past speciation events. Phylogenies are…
Phylogenetic inference aims to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of different species based on genetic (or other) data. Discrete characters are a particular type of data, which contain information on how the species should be…
Horizontal gene transfer inference approaches are usually based on gene sequences: parametric methods search for patterns that deviate from a particular genomic signature, while phylogenetic methods use sequences to reconstruct the gene and…
Bayesian inference is now a leading technique for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from aligned sequence data. In this short note, we formally show that the maximum posterior tree topology provides a statistically consistent estimate of a…
Modern biological techniques enable very dense genetic sampling of unfolding evolutionary histories, and thus frequently sample some genotypes multiple times. This motivates strategies to incorporate genotype abundance information in…
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees relating species. Along branches, sequence evolution is modelled using a continuous-time Markov process characterised by an instantaneous rate…
Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…
Repetitions within a given genealogical tree provides some information about the degree of consanguineity of a population. They can be analyzed with techniques usually employed in statistical physics when dealing with fixed point…
Molecular phylogeny has focused mainly on improving models for the reconstruction of gene trees based on sequence alignments. Yet, most phylogeneticists seek to reveal the history of species. Although the histories of genes and species are…
Changing base composition during the evolution of biological sequences can mislead some of the phylogenetic inference techniques in current use. However, detecting whether such a process has occurred may be difficult, since convergent…
Species richness varies widely across the tree of life, and there is great interest in identifying ecological, geographic, and other factors that affect rates of species proliferation. Recent methods for explicitly modeling the…
We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution,…
The reliability of a phylogenetic inference method from genomic sequence data is ensured by its statistical consistency. Bayesian inference methods produce a sample of phylogenetic trees from the posterior distribution given sequence data.…
This issue includes six articles that develop and apply statistical methods for the analysis of gene sequencing data of different types. The methods are tailored to the different data types and, in each case, lead to biological insights not…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
Likelihood-based methods are widely considered the best approaches for reconstructing ancestral states. Although much effort has been made to study properties of these methods, previous works often assume that both the tree topology and…
Much of the on-going statistical analysis of DNA sequences is focused on the estimation of characteristics of coding and non-coding regions that would possibly allow discrimination of these regions. In the current approach, we concentrate…
In an extant population, how much information do extant individuals provide on the pedigree of their ancestors? Recent work by Kim, Mossel, Ramnarayan and Turner (2020) studied this question under a number of simplifying assumptions,…
Phylogeny can be inferred using two sources of data from an organism: morphological data and molecular data. Historically, phylogenies were usually inferred using morphological characters, but some morphological features may not necessarily…
The Persistent-Phylogeny Model is an extension of the widely studied Perfect-Phylogeny Model, encompassing a broader range of evolutionary phenomena. Biological and algorithmic questions concerning persistent phylogeny have been intensely…