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Title: Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Species Trees from Gene Trees in the Presence of Ancestral Population Structure
Though large multilocus genomic data sets have led to overall improvements in phylogenetic inference, they have posed the new challenge of addressing conflicting signals across the genome. In particular, ancestral population structure, which has been uncovered in a number of diverse species, can skew gene tree frequencies, thereby hindering the performance of species tree estimators. Here we develop a novel maximum likelihood method, termed TASTI (Taxa with Ancestral structure Species Tree Inference), that can infer phylogenies under such scenarios, and find that it has increasing accuracy with increasing numbers of input gene trees, contrasting with the relatively poor performances of methods not tailored for ancestral structure. Moreover, we propose a supertree approach that allows TASTI to scale computationally with increasing numbers of input taxa. We use genetic simulations to assess TASTI’s performance in the three- and four-taxon settings and demonstrate the application of TASTI on a six-species Afrotropical mosquito data set. Finally, we have implemented TASTI in an open-source software package for ease of use by the scientific community.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2001063 1949268 1753489
NSF-PAR ID:
10187891
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Genome biology and evolution
Volume:
12
Issue:
2
ISSN:
1759-6653
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3977–3995
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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