Error in Phylogenetic Estimation for Bushes in the Tree of Life

Many rapid radiations, or bushes, throughout the Tree of Life remain unresolved. Here, we investigated how the shape of a bush interacts with two key processes -­ coalescence and mutation -­ that can lead to errors in phylogenetic species and sampling more loci as well as the utility of a species tree method based upon gene tree reconciliation and the concatenation of multiple loci for resolving bushes. We examined different bush shapes, varying both the speciation rate during the radiation and the depth of the radiation, to encompass a broad range of situations. Using simulations based upon parameters derived from empirical studies, we investigated the performance of phylogenetic analyses a single individual for more loci outperformed sampling multiple individuals for one locus in all cases except the most recent radiations. We found that error due to homoplastic mutations increased with depth, while error due to the coalescent process remained unchanged. These simulations also revealed that, for certain ancient bushes, analyses of concatenated data matrices surprisingly resulted in more accurate phylogenies than gene tree reconciliation. The the superiority of concatenation per se. Our results suggest concatenation remains a useful approximate method for species tree estimation, even for rapid evolutionary radiations. However, improved estimation of gene trees combined with use of gene tree reconciliation has the greatest potential for resolving the remaining bushes of the Tree of Life. *Corresponding author: Swati Patel, Department of Biology, 223 Bartram Hall, P.O. Box 118525, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611-­8525, USA, Tel: 224-­558-­9786;; E-­mail: [email protected] Received March 26, 2013;; Accepted May 31, 2013;; Published June 10, 2013 Citation: Patel S, Kimball RT, Braun EL (2013) Error in Phylogenetic Estimation for Bushes in the Tree of Life. J Phylogen Evolution Biol 1: 110. doi:10.4172/ jpgeb.1000110 Copyright: © 2013 Patel S, et al. This is an open-­access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.