Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol 16, 1098-1104, Copyright © 1999 by Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
HW Deng, JL Li and J Li
Mutations may be classified according to their positions of occurrence in
the genealogy of the sampled DNA sequences from a population. A mutation is
said to be of size i if it has i descendants in the sample. Such
classifications for mutations may yield detailed insights into the
evolutionary history and properties of the population. Statistical methods
based on such classification have been developed and shown to be efficient
and powerful. However, the utility of these statistical methods critically
depends on reliable and robust recovery of mutations of different sizes. We
investigated the distributional changes of mutations of different sizes due
to genealogy reconstruction using the unweighted pair-group method with
arithmetic mean (UPGMA) and the performance of maximum-parsimony method in
inferring mutations of different sizes on a given topology. Genealogy
reconstruction by UPGMA was found to change the distribution of mutations
of different sizes on constructed topologies. Multiple hits at some
nucleotide sites made it difficult to infer mutations of different sizes
with the maximum- parsimony method, even when the true topology was
designated. These results suggest that while the newly developed
statistical methods employing information on mutations of different sites
are powerful, they also impose significant new challenges for developing
methods to accurately recover mutations of different sizes from population
DNA sequence data.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Recovery of mutations of different sizes from a population sample of DNA sequences under variable mutation rates across sites
Osteoporosis Research Center, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska 68131, USA. deng@creighton.edu
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