PHYLOGENETIC TREE

(Redirected from Evolutionary tree)
Fig. 1: A speculatively rooted tree for rRNA genes

A 'phylogenetic tree', also called an 'evolutionary tree', is a tree showing the evolutionary interrelationships among various species or other entities that are believed to have a common ancestor. In a phylogenetic tree, each node with descendants represents the most recent common ancestor of the descendants, with edge lengths sometimes corresponding to time estimates. Each node in a phylogenetic tree is called a taxonomic unit. Internal nodes are generally referred to as Hypothetical Taxonomic Units (HTUs) as they cannot be directly observed.
Although the idea of a "tree of life" arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower to higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being), Charles Darwin (1859) ''first'' illustrated and popularized the notion of an evolutionary "tree" in his seminal book ''The Origin of Species''. Over a century later, evolutionary biologists still use tree diagrams to depict evolution because the floral analogy effectively conveys the concept that speciation occurs through the adaptive and random splitting of lineages.

Contents
Types of phylogenetic trees
Phylogenetic tree construction
Limitations of phylogenetic trees
See also
References
External links
Images
General

Types of phylogenetic trees


Fig. 1: Unrooted tree of the myosin supergene family A myosin family tree, Hodge T, Cope M, , , J Cell Sci, 2000

Fig. 2: A highly resolved, automatically generated Tree Of Life, based on completely sequenced genomes [1][2].

A 'rooted' phylogenetic tree is a directed tree with a unique node corresponding to the (usually imputed) most recent common ancestor of all the entities at the leaves of the tree. The most common method for rooting trees is the use of an uncontroversial outgroup - close enough to allow inference from sequence or trait data, but far enough to be a clear outgroup.
'Unrooted' trees illustrate the relatedness of the leaf nodes without making assumptions about common ancestry. While unrooted trees can always be generated from rooted ones by simply omitting the root, a root cannot be inferred from an unrooted tree without some means of identifying ancestry; this is normally done by including an outgroup in the input data or introducing additional assumptions about the relative rates of evolution on each branch, such as an application of the molecular clock hypothesis. Figure 1 depicts an unrooted phylogenetic tree for myosin, a superfamily of proteins. Uprooting the Tree of Life, Maher BA, , , The Scientist, 2002
Both rooted and unrooted phylogenetic trees can be either 'bifurcating' or 'multifurcating', and either ''labeled'' or ''unlabeled''. A bifurcating tree has a maximum of two descendants arising from each interior node, while a multifurcating tree may have more than two. A labeled tree has specific values assigned to its leaves, while an unlabeled tree, sometimes called a 'tree shape', only defines a topology. The number of possible trees for a given number of leaf nodes depends on the specific type of tree, but there are always more multifurcating than bifurcating trees, more labeled than unlabeled trees, and more rooted than unrooted trees. The last distinction is the most biologically relevant; it arises because there are many places on an unrooted tree to put the root. For labeled bifurcating trees, there are
:
rac{(2n-3)!}{2^{n-2}(n-2)!}

total rooted trees and
:
rac{(2n-5)!}{2^{n-3}(n-3)!}

total unrooted trees, where ''n'' represents the number of leaf nodes. The number of unrooted trees for ''n'' input sequences or species is equal to the number of rooted trees for ''n-1'' sequences.[3]
A 'dendrogram' is a broad term for the diagrammatic representation of a phylogenetic tree.
A 'cladogram' is a tree formed using cladistic methods. This type of tree only represents a branching pattern, i.e., its branch lengths do not represent time.
A 'phylogram' is a phylogenetic tree that explicitly represents number of character changes through its branch lengths.
An 'ultrametric tree' or 'chronogram' is a phylogenetic tree that explicitly represents evolutionary time through its branch lengths.

Phylogenetic tree construction


Main articles: Computational phylogenetics

Phylogenetic trees among a nontrivial number of input sequences are constructed using computational phylogenetics methods. Distance-matrix methods such as neighbor-joining or UPGMA, which calculate genetic distance from multiple sequence alignments, are simplest to implement, but do not invoke an evolutionary model. Many sequence alignment methods such as ClustalW produce both sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees. Methods including maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference apply an explicit model of evolution to phylogenetics.3 Identifying the optimal tree using many of these techniques is NP-hard3, so heuristic search and optimization methods are used in combination with tree-scoring functions to identify a reasonably good tree that fits the data.
Tree-building methods can be assessed on the basis of several criteria:[4]

★ efficiency (how long does it take to compute the answer, how much memory does it need?)

★ power (does it make good use of the data, or is information being wasted?)

★ consistency (will it converge on the same answer repeatedly, if each time given different data for the same model problem?)

★ robustness (does it cope well with violations of the assumptions of the underlying model?)

★ falsifiability (does it alert us when it is not good to use, i.e. when assumptions are violated?)
Tree-building techniques have also gained the attention of mathematicians. Trees can also be built using T-theory. [5]

Limitations of phylogenetic trees


Although phylogenetic trees produced on the basis of sequenced genes or genomic data in different species can provide evolutionary insight, they do have important limitations. Phylogenetic trees do not necessarily (and likely do not) represent actual evolutionary history. The data on which they are based is noisy; horizontal gene transfer On the evolution of cells, Woese C, , , Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2002 , hybridisation between species that were not nearest neighbors on the tree before hybridisation takes place, convergent evolution, and conserved sequences can all confound the analysis. One method of analysis implemented in the program PhyloCode does not assume a tree structure to avoid these limitations.
Furthermore, basing the analysis on a single gene or protein taken from a group of species can be problematic because such trees constructed from another unrelated gene or protein sequence often differ from the first, and therefore great care is needed in inferring phylogenetic relationships amongst species. This is most true of genetic material that is subject to lateral gene transfer and recombination, where different haplotype blocks can have different histories.
When extinct species are included in a tree, they should always be terminal nodes, as it is unlikely that they are direct ancestors of any extant species. Scepticism must apply when extinct species are included in trees that are wholly or partly based on DNA sequence data, due to evidence that "ancient DNA" is not preserved intact for longer than 100,000 years.

See also



Animal evolution
Computational phylogenetics
Dendrogram
Endosymbiosis
Evolution
Evolution of multicellularity
Phylogenetic comparative methods

Phylogeny
Taxonomy
★ ''The Ancestor's Tale'' by Richard Dawkins
Tree structure

Wikispecies

References


1. Interactive Tree Of Life (iTOL): an online tool for phylogenetic tree display and annotation., , I, Letunic, Bioinformatics, 2007
2. Toward automatic reconstruction of a highly resolved tree of life., , FD, Ciccarelli, Science, 2006
3. Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.
4. Penny, D., Hendy, M. D. & M. A. Steel. 1992. Progress with methods for constructing evolutionary trees. ''Trends in Ecology and Evolution'' '7': 73-79.
5. A. Dress, K. T. Huber, and V. Moulton. 2001. Metric Spaces in Pure and Applied Mathematics. ''Documenta Mathematica'' ''LSU 2001'': 121-139

External links


Images


Phylogenetic Trees Based on 16s rDNA

A 3D View

Human Y-Chromosome 2002 Phylogenetic Tree

★ In 2003, the ''Science'' journal dedicated a special issue to the tree of life, including an online version of a tree of life.

iTOL: Interactive Tree Of Life

Phylogenetic Tree of Artificial Organisms Evolved on Computers
General


Discover Life An interactive tree based on the U.S. National Science Foundation's Assembling the Tree of Life Project

PhyloCode

A Multiple Alignment of 139 Myosin Sequences and a Phylogenetic Tree

Tree of Life Web Project

★ http://www.aisee.com/graph_of_the_month/jura.htm — The most detailed and comprehensive family tree of dinosaurs yet available

★ http://www.omne-vivum.com tree of life with lots of pictures

Phylogenetic inferring on the T-REX server

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