Techniques for the verification of minimal phylogenetic trees illustrated with ten mammalian haemoglobin sequences.
We have recently reported a method to identify the shortest possible phylogenetic tree for a set of protein sequences [Foulds Hendy & Penny (1979) J. Mol. Evol. 13. 127--150; Foulds, Penny & Hendy (1979) J. Mol. Evol. 13, 151--166]. The present paper discusses issues that arise during the construction of minimal phylogenetic trees from protein-sequence data. The conversion of the data from amino acid sequences into nucleotide sequences is shown to be advantageous. A new variation of a method for constructing a minimal tree is presented. Our previous methods have involved first constructing a tree and then either proving that it is minimal or transforming it into a minimal tree. The approach presented in the present paper progressively builds up a tree, taxon by taxon. We illustrate this approach by using it to construct a minimal tree for ten mammalian haemoglobin alpha-chain sequences. Finally we define a measure of the complexity of the data and illustrate a method to derive a directed phylogenetic tree from the minimal tree.
D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D004285:Dogs; D000882:Haplorhini; D006454:Hemoglobins; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals; D008722:Methods; D051379:Mice; D008954:Models, Biological; D009711:Nucleotides; D010802:Phylogeny; D011817:Rabbits
D006454:Hemoglobins; D009711:Nucleotides