scholarly journals The Influence of Gene Flow on Species Tree Estimation: A Simulation Study

2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Leaché ◽  
Rebecca B. Harris ◽  
Bruce Rannala ◽  
Ziheng Yang
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liming Cai ◽  
Zhenxiang Xi ◽  
Emily Moriarty Lemmon ◽  
Alan R Lemmon ◽  
Austin Mast ◽  
...  

Abstract The genomic revolution offers renewed hope of resolving rapid radiations in the Tree of Life. The development of the multispecies coalescent (MSC) model and improved gene tree estimation methods can better accommodate gene tree heterogeneity caused by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and gene tree estimation error stemming from the short internal branches. However, the relative influence of these factors in species tree inference is not well understood. Using anchored hybrid enrichment, we generated a data set including 423 single-copy loci from 64 taxa representing 39 families to infer the species tree of the flowering plant order Malpighiales. This order includes nine of the top ten most unstable nodes in angiosperms, which have been hypothesized to arise from the rapid radiation during the Cretaceous. Here, we show that coalescent-based methods do not resolve the backbone of Malpighiales and concatenation methods yield inconsistent estimations, providing evidence that gene tree heterogeneity is high in this clade. Despite high levels of ILS and gene tree estimation error, our simulations demonstrate that these two factors alone are insufficient to explain the lack of resolution in this order. To explore this further, we examined triplet frequencies among empirical gene trees and discovered some of them deviated significantly from those attributed to ILS and estimation error, suggesting gene flow as an additional and previously unappreciated phenomenon promoting gene tree variation in Malpighiales. Finally, we applied a novel method to quantify the relative contribution of these three primary sources of gene tree heterogeneity and demonstrated that ILS, gene tree estimation error, and gene flow contributed to 10.0%, 34.8%, and 21.4% of the variation, respectively. Together, our results suggest that a perfect storm of factors likely influence this lack of resolution, and further indicate that recalcitrant phylogenetic relationships like the backbone of Malpighiales may be better represented as phylogenetic networks. Thus, reducing such groups solely to existing models that adhere strictly to bifurcating trees greatly oversimplifies reality, and obscures our ability to more clearly discern the process of evolution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (5) ◽  
pp. 830-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiyun Jiao ◽  
Tomáš Flouri ◽  
Bruce Rannala ◽  
Ziheng Yang

Abstract Recent analyses of genomic sequence data suggest cross-species gene flow is common in both plants and animals, posing challenges to species tree estimation. We examine the levels of gene flow needed to mislead species tree estimation with three species and either episodic introgressive hybridization or continuous migration between an outgroup and one ingroup species. Several species tree estimation methods are examined, including the majority-vote method based on the most common gene tree topology (with either the true or reconstructed gene trees used), the UPGMA method based on the average sequence distances (or average coalescent times) between species, and the full-likelihood method based on multilocus sequence data. Our results suggest that the majority-vote method based on gene tree topologies is more robust to gene flow than the UPGMA method based on coalescent times and both are more robust than likelihood assuming a multispecies coalescent (MSC) model with no cross-species gene flow. Comparison of the continuous migration model with the episodic introgression model suggests that a small amount of gene flow per generation can cause drastic changes to the genetic history of the species and mislead species tree methods, especially if the species diverged through radiative speciation events. Estimates of parameters under the MSC with gene flow suggest that African mosquito species in the Anopheles gambiae species complex constitute such an example of extreme impact of gene flow on species phylogeny. [IM; introgression; migration; MSci; multispecies coalescent; species tree.]


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liming Cai ◽  
Zhenxiang Xi ◽  
Emily Moriarty Lemmon ◽  
Alan R. Lemmon ◽  
Austin Mast ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThe genomic revolution offers renewed hope of resolving rapid radiations in the Tree of Life. The development of the multispecies coalescent (MSC) model and improved gene tree estimation methods can better accommodate gene tree heterogeneity caused by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and gene tree estimation error stemming from the short internal branches. However, the relative influence of these factors in species tree inference is not well understood. Using anchored hybrid enrichment, we generated a data set including 423 single-copy loci from 64 taxa representing 39 families to infer the species tree of the flowering plant order Malpighiales. This order alone includes nine of the top ten most unstable nodes in angiosperms, and the recalcitrant relationships along the backbone of the order have been hypothesized to arise from the rapid radiation during the Cretaceous. Here, we show that coalescent-based methods do not resolve the backbone of Malpighiales and concatenation methods yield inconsistent estimations, providing evidence that gene tree heterogeneity is high in this clade. Despite high levels of ILS and gene tree estimation error, our simulations demonstrate that these two factors alone are insufficient to explain the lack of resolution in this order. To explore this further, we examined triplet frequencies among empirical gene trees and discovered some of them deviated significantly from those attributed to ILS and estimation error, suggesting gene flow as an additional and previously unappreciated phenomenon promoting gene tree variation in Malpighiales. Finally, we applied a novel method to quantify the relative contribution of these three primary sources of gene tree heterogeneity and demonstrated that ILS, gene tree estimation error, and gene flow contributed to 15%, 52%, and 32% of the variation, respectively. Together, our results suggest that a perfect storm of factors likely influence this lack of resolution, and further indicate that recalcitrant phylogenetic relationships like the backbone of Malpighiales may be better represented as phylogenetic networks. Thus, reducing such groups solely to existing models that adhere strictly to bifurcating trees greatly oversimplifies reality, and obscures our ability to more clearly discern the process of evolution.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiyun Jiao ◽  
Thomas Flouris ◽  
Bruce Rannala ◽  
Ziheng Yang

ABSTRACTRecent analyses of genomic sequence data suggest cross-species gene flow is common in both plants and animals, posing challenges to species tree inference. We examine the levels of gene flow needed to mislead species tree estimation with three species and either episodic introgressive hybridization or continuous migration between an outgroup and one ingroup species. Several species tree estimation methods are examined, including the majority-vote method based on the most common gene tree topology (with either the true or reconstructed gene trees used), the UPGMA method based on the average sequence distances (or average coalescent times) between species, and the full-likelihood method based on multi-locus sequence data. Our results suggest that the majority-vote method is more robust to gene flow than the UPGMA method and both are more robust than likelihood assuming a multispecies coalescent (MSC) model with no cross-species gene flow. A small amount of introgression or migration can mislead species tree methods if the species diverged through speciation events separated by short time intervals. Estimates of parameters under the MSC with gene flow suggest the Anopheles gambia African mosquito species complex is an example where gene flow greatly impacts species phylogeny.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Hill ◽  
Sebastien Roch

We consider species tree estimation from multiple loci subject to intralocus recombination. We focus on R∗, a summary coalescent-based methods using rooted triplets. We demonstrate analytically that intralocus recombination gives rise to an inconsistency zone, in which correct inference is not assured even in the limit of infinite amount of data. In addition, we validate and characterize this inconsistency zone through a simulation study that suggests that differential rates of recombination between closely related taxa can amplify the effect of incomplete lineage sorting and contribute to inconsistency.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Ali Nayeem ◽  
Md. Shamsuzzoha Bayzid ◽  
Sakshar Chakravarty ◽  
Mohammad Saifur Rahman ◽  
M. Sohel Rahman

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (14) ◽  
pp. i417-i426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin K Molloy ◽  
Tandy Warnow

Abstract Motivation At RECOMB-CG 2018, we presented NJMerge and showed that it could be used within a divide-and-conquer framework to scale computationally intensive methods for species tree estimation to larger datasets. However, NJMerge has two significant limitations: it can fail to return a tree and, when used within the proposed divide-and-conquer framework, has O(n5) running time for datasets with n species. Results Here we present a new method called ‘TreeMerge’ that improves on NJMerge in two ways: it is guaranteed to return a tree and it has dramatically faster running time within the same divide-and-conquer framework—only O(n2) time. We use a simulation study to evaluate TreeMerge in the context of multi-locus species tree estimation with two leading methods, ASTRAL-III and RAxML. We find that the divide-and-conquer framework using TreeMerge has a minor impact on species tree accuracy, dramatically reduces running time, and enables both ASTRAL-III and RAxML to complete on datasets (that they would otherwise fail on), when given 64 GB of memory and 48 h maximum running time. Thus, TreeMerge is a step toward a larger vision of enabling researchers with limited computational resources to perform large-scale species tree estimation, which we call Phylogenomics for All. Availability and implementation TreeMerge is publicly available on Github (http://github.com/ekmolloy/treemerge). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. i57-i65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin K Molloy ◽  
Tandy Warnow

Abstract Motivation Species tree estimation is a basic part of biological research but can be challenging because of gene duplication and loss (GDL), which results in genes that can appear more than once in a given genome. All common approaches in phylogenomic studies either reduce available data or are error-prone, and thus, scalable methods that do not discard data and have high accuracy on large heterogeneous datasets are needed. Results We present FastMulRFS, a polynomial-time method for estimating species trees without knowledge of orthology. We prove that FastMulRFS is statistically consistent under a generic model of GDL when adversarial GDL does not occur. Our extensive simulation study shows that FastMulRFS matches the accuracy of MulRF (which tries to solve the same optimization problem) and has better accuracy than prior methods, including ASTRAL-multi (the only method to date that has been proven statistically consistent under GDL), while being much faster than both methods. Availability and impementation FastMulRFS is available on Github (https://github.com/ekmolloy/fastmulrfs). Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


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