scholarly journals Breaking bud: probing the scalability limits of phylogenetic network inference methods

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hussein A Hejase ◽  
Kevin J Liu

AbstractBackgroundBranching events in phylogenetic trees reflect strictly bifurcating and/or multifurcating speciation and splitting events. In the presence of gene flow, a phylogeny cannot be described by a tree but is instead a directed acyclic graph known as a phylogenetic network. Both phylogenetic trees and networks are typically reconstructed using computational analysis of multi-locus sequence data. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has brought about two main scalability challenges:(1) dataset size in terms of the number of taxa and (2) the evolutionary divergence of the taxa in a study. The impact of both dimensions of scale on phylogenetic tree inference has been well characterized by recent studies; in contrast, the scalability limits of phylogenetic network inference methods are largely unknown. In this study, we quantify the performance of state-of-the-art phylogenetic network inference methods on large-scale datasets using empirical data sampled from natural mouse populations and synthetic data capturing a wide range of evolutionary scenarios.ResultsWe find that, as in the case of phylogenetic tree inference, the performance of leading network inference methods is negatively impacted by both dimensions of dataset scale. In general, we found that topological accuracy degrades as the number of taxa increases; a similar effect was observed with increased sequence mutation rate. The most accurate methods were probabilistic inference methods which maximize either likelihood under coalescent-based models or pseudo-likelihood approximations to the model likelihood. Furthermore, probabilistic inference methods with optimization criteria which did not make use of gene tree root and/or branch length information performed best-a result that runs contrary to widely held assumptions in the literature. The improved accuracy obtained with probabilistic inference methods comes at a computational cost in terms of runtime and main memory usage, which quickly become prohibitive as dataset size grows past thirty taxa.ConclusionsWe conclude that the state of the art of phylogenetic network inference lags well behind the scope of current phylogenomic studies. New algorithmic development is critically needed to address this methodological gap.

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Collienne ◽  
Alex Gavryushkin

AbstractMany popular algorithms for searching the space of leaf-labelled (phylogenetic) trees are based on tree rearrangement operations. Under any such operation, the problem is reduced to searching a graph where vertices are trees and (undirected) edges are given by pairs of trees connected by one rearrangement operation (sometimes called a move). Most popular are the classical nearest neighbour interchange, subtree prune and regraft, and tree bisection and reconnection moves. The problem of computing distances, however, is $${\mathbf {N}}{\mathbf {P}}$$ N P -hard in each of these graphs, making tree inference and comparison algorithms challenging to design in practice. Although anked phylogenetic trees are one of the central objects of interest in applications such as cancer research, immunology, and epidemiology, the computational complexity of the shortest path problem for these trees remained unsolved for decades. In this paper, we settle this problem for the ranked nearest neighbour interchange operation by establishing that the complexity depends on the weight difference between the two types of tree rearrangements (rank moves and edge moves), and varies from quadratic, which is the lowest possible complexity for this problem, to $${\mathbf {N}}{\mathbf {P}}$$ N P -hard, which is the highest. In particular, our result provides the first example of a phylogenetic tree rearrangement operation for which shortest paths, and hence the distance, can be computed efficiently. Specifically, our algorithm scales to trees with tens of thousands of leaves (and likely hundreds of thousands if implemented efficiently).


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurélie Pirayre ◽  
Camille Couprie ◽  
Frédérique Bidard ◽  
Laurent Duval ◽  
Jean-Christophe Pesquet

Background: Inferring gene networks from high-throughput data constitutes an important step in the discovery of relevant regulatory relationships in organism cells. Despite the large number of available Gene Regulatory Network inference methods, the problem remains challenging: the underdetermination in the space of possible solutions requires additional constraints that incorporate a priori information on gene interactions. Methods: Weighting all possible pairwise gene relationships by a probability of edge presence, we formulate the regulatory network inference as a discrete variational problem on graphs. We enforce biologically plausible coupling between groups and types of genes by minimizing an edge labeling functional coding for a priori structures. The optimization is carried out with Graph cuts, an approach popular in image processing and computer vision. We compare the inferred regulatory networks to results achieved by the mutual-information-based Context Likelihood of Relatedness (CLR) method and by the state-of-the-art GENIE3, winner of the DREAM4 multifactorial challenge. Results: Our BRANE Cut approach infers more accurately the five DREAM4 in silico networks (with improvements from 6% to 11%). On a real Escherichia coli compendium, an improvement of 11.8% compared to CLR and 3% compared to GENIE3 is obtained in terms of Area Under Precision-Recall curve. Up to 48 additional verified interactions are obtained over GENIE3 for a given precision. On this dataset involving 4345 genes, our method achieves a performance similar to that of GENIE3, while being more than seven times faster. The BRANE Cut code is available at: http://www-syscom.univ-mlv.fr/~pirayre/Codes-GRN-BRANE-cut.html Conclusions: BRANE Cut is a weighted graph thresholding method. Using biologically sound penalties and data-driven parameters, it improves three state-of-the-art GRN inference methods. It is applicable as a generic network inference post-processing, due its computational efficiency.


2006 ◽  
Vol 04 (01) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
YING-JUN HE ◽  
TRINH N. D. HUYNH ◽  
JESPER JANSSON ◽  
WING-KIN SUNG

To construct a phylogenetic tree or phylogenetic network for describing the evolutionary history of a set of species is a well-studied problem in computational biology. One previously proposed method to infer a phylogenetic tree/network for a large set of species is by merging a collection of known smaller phylogenetic trees on overlapping sets of species so that no (or as little as possible) branching information is lost. However, little work has been done so far on inferring a phylogenetic tree/network from a specified set of trees when in addition, certain evolutionary relationships among the species are known to be highly unlikely. In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing a phylogenetic tree/network which is consistent with all of the rooted triplets in a given set [Formula: see text] and none of the rooted triplets in another given set [Formula: see text]. Although NP-hard in the general case, we provide some efficient exact and approximation algorithms for a number of biologically meaningful variants of the problem.


Author(s):  
Ruoyi Cai ◽  
Cécile Ané

Abstract Motivation With growing genome-wide molecular datasets from next-generation sequencing, phylogenetic networks can be estimated using a variety of approaches. These phylogenetic networks include events like hybridization, gene flow or horizontal gene transfer explicitly. However, the most accurate network inference methods are computationally heavy. Methods that scale to larger datasets do not calculate a full likelihood, such that traditional likelihood-based tools for model selection are not applicable to decide how many past hybridization events best fit the data. We propose here a goodness-of-fit test to quantify the fit between data observed from genome-wide multi-locus data, and patterns expected under the multi-species coalescent model on a candidate phylogenetic network. Results We identified weaknesses in the previously proposed TICR test, and proposed corrections. The performance of our new test was validated by simulations on real-world phylogenetic networks. Our test provides one of the first rigorous tools for model selection, to select the adequate network complexity for the data at hand. The test can also work for identifying poorly inferred areas on a network. Availability and implementation Software for the goodness-of-fit test is available as a Julia package at https://github.com/cecileane/QuartetNetworkGoodnessFit.jl. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosanne Wallin ◽  
Leo van Iersel ◽  
Steven Kelk ◽  
Leen Stougie

Abstract Background Rooted phylogenetic networks are used to display complex evolutionary history involving so-called reticulation events, such as genetic recombination. Various methods have been developed to construct such networks, using for example a multiple sequence alignment or multiple phylogenetic trees as input data. Coronaviruses are known to recombine frequently, but rooted phylogenetic networks have not yet been used extensively to describe their evolutionary history. Here, we created a workflow to compare the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 with other SARS-like viruses using several rooted phylogenetic network inference algorithms. This workflow includes filtering noise from sets of phylogenetic trees by contracting edges based on branch length and bootstrap support, followed by resolution of multifurcations. We explored the running times of the network inference algorithms, the impact of filtering on the properties of the produced networks, and attempted to derive biological insights regarding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 from them. Results The network inference algorithms are capable of constructing rooted phylogenetic networks for coronavirus data, although running-time limitations require restricting such datasets to a relatively small number of taxa. Filtering generally reduces the number of reticulations in the produced networks and increases their temporal consistency. Taxon bat-SL-CoVZC45 emerges as a major and structural source of discordance in the dataset. The tested algorithms often indicate that SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 is a tree-like clade, with possibly some reticulate activity further back in their history. A smaller number of constructed networks posit SARS-CoV-2 as a possible recombinant, although this might be a methodological artefact arising from the interaction of bat-SL-CoVZC45 discordance and the optimization criteria used. Conclusion Our results demonstrate that as part of a wider workflow and with careful attention paid to running time, rooted phylogenetic network algorithms are capable of producing plausible networks from coronavirus data. These networks partly corroborate existing theories about SARS-CoV-2, and partly produce new avenues for exploration regarding the location and significance of reticulate activity within the wider group of SARS-like viruses. Our workflow may serve as a model for pipelines in which phylogenetic network algorithms can be used to analyse different datasets and test different hypotheses.


Author(s):  
Klaus Schliep ◽  
Alastair Alastair Potts ◽  
David A Morrison ◽  
Guido W Grimm

The fields of phylogenetic tree and network inference have dramatically advanced in the last decade, but independently with few attempts to bridge them. Here we provide a framework, implemented in the phangorn library in R, to transfer information between trees and networks. This includes: 1) identifying and labelling equivalent tree branches and network edges, 2) transferring branch support to network edges, and 3) mapping bipartition support from a sample of trees (e.g. from bootstrapping or Bayesian inference) onto network edges. The ability to readily combine tree and network information should lead to more comprehensive evolutionary comparisons and conclusions.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Schliep ◽  
Alastair Alastair Potts ◽  
David A Morrison ◽  
Guido W Grimm

The fields of phylogenetic tree and network inference have dramatically advanced in the last decade, but independently with few attempts to bridge them. Here we provide a framework, implemented in the phangorn library in R, to transfer information between trees and networks. This includes: 1) identifying and labelling equivalent tree branches and network edges, 2) transferring branch support to network edges, and 3) mapping bipartition support from a sample of trees (e.g. from bootstrapping or Bayesian inference) onto network edges. The ability to readily combine tree and network information should lead to more comprehensive evolutionary comparisons and conclusions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Francis ◽  
K. T. Huber ◽  
V. Moulton

Abstract Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that are used to represent non-tree-like evolutionary histories that arise in organisms such as plants and bacteria, or uncertainty in evolutionary histories. An unrooted phylogenetic network on a non-empty, finite set X of taxa, or network, is a connected, simple graph in which every vertex has degree 1 or 3 and whose leaf set is X. It is called a phylogenetic tree if the underlying graph is a tree. In this paper we consider properties of tree-based networks, that is, networks that can be constructed by adding edges into a phylogenetic tree. We show that although they have some properties in common with their rooted analogues which have recently drawn much attention in the literature, they have some striking differences in terms of both their structural and computational properties. We expect that our results could eventually have applications to, for example, detecting horizontal gene transfer or hybridization which are important factors in the evolution of many organisms.


Author(s):  
Matteo Manica ◽  
Charlotte Bunne ◽  
Roland Mathis ◽  
Joris Cadow ◽  
Mehmet Eren Ahsen ◽  
...  

Abstract Summary The advent of high-throughput technologies has provided researchers with measurements of thousands of molecular entities and enable the investigation of the internal regulatory apparatus of the cell. However, network inference from high-throughput data is far from being a solved problem. While a plethora of different inference methods have been proposed, they often lead to non-overlapping predictions, and many of them lack user-friendly implementations to enable their broad utilization. Here, we present Consensus Interaction Network Inference Service (COSIFER), a package and a companion web-based platform to infer molecular networks from expression data using state-of-the-art consensus approaches. COSIFER includes a selection of state-of-the-art methodologies for network inference and different consensus strategies to integrate the predictions of individual methods and generate robust networks. Availability and implementation COSIFER Python source code is available at https://github.com/PhosphorylatedRabbits/cosifer. The web service is accessible at https://ibm.biz/cosifer-aas. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yafei Mao ◽  
Siqing Hou ◽  
Evan P. Economo

AbstractMultilocus genomic datasets can be used to infer a rich set of information about the evolutionary history of a lineage, including gene trees, species trees, and phylogenetic networks. However, user-friendly tools to run such integrated analyses are lacking, and workflows often require tedious reformatting and handling time to shepherd data through a series of individual programs. Here, we present a tool written in Python—TREEasy—that performs automated sequence alignment (with MAFFT), gene tree inference (with IQ-Tree), species inference from concatenated data (with IQ-Tree), species tree inference from gene trees (with ASTRAL, MP-EST, and STELLS2), and phylogenetic network inference (with SNaQ and PhyloNet). The tool only requires FASTA files and nine parameters as inputs. The Tool can be run as command line or through a Graphical User Interface (GUI). As examples, we reproduced a recent analysis of staghorn coral evolution, and performed a new analysis on the evolution of the WGD clade of yeast. The latter revealed novel inferences that were not identified by previous analyses. TREEasy represents a reliable and simple tool to accelerate research in systematic biology (https://github.com/MaoYafei/TREEasy).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document