2 ms·
It would seem to me that bacteriophages alone sort of ruin the idea of a phylogeny with a single root.
by niels_olson 10y ago
It would seem to me that bacteriophages alone sort of ruin the idea of a phylogeny with a single root.
- civilian 10y agoHow so? I will happily agree that bacteriophages & HGT ruin the idea that phylogenetic tree can be a perfect tree-- our phylogenetic tree has many undirected cycles in it.
- niels_olson 10y agoHow would you reconstruct the phylogeny to see through that mess? We're not even talking about computational complexity yet. Simply, how do you see through a random number of random DNA fragments being inserted in random places of random genomes at random intervals over a billion years?
- civilian 10y agoHmmm I see what you're saying. It's a mess but I optimistically think it's still something we will be able to tease out, by looking at many genes in a genome. FWIW, It was recently estimated that 2% of core genes per genome are from HGT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer_in_evolution#Resolution_of_uncertainty_with_phylogenomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer_in_ev... It makes HGT fairly identifiable and gives us a lot of non-transfered genes to work with when reconstructing a tree.