MBE Advance Access originally published online on November 9, 2005
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006 23(3):491-498; doi:10.1093/molbev/msj059
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Research Article |
Beyond Pairwise Distances: Neighbor-Joining with Phylogenetic Diversity Estimates

* Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley and
Department of Mathematics, Duke University
E-mail: lpachter{at}math.berkeley.edu.
The "neighbor-joining algorithm" is a recursive procedure for reconstructing trees that is based on a transformation of pairwise distances between leaves. We present a generalization of the neighbor-joining transformation, which uses estimates of phylogenetic diversity rather than pairwise distances in the tree. This leads to an improved neighbor-joining algorithm whose total running time is still polynomial in the number of taxa. On simulated data, the method outperforms other distance-based methods. We have implemented neighbor-joining for subtree weights in a program called MJOIN which is freely available under the Gnu Public License at http://bio.math.berkeley.edu/mjoin/.
Key Words: neighbor-joining phylogenetic diversity subtree weights