Treespace: statistical exploration of landscapes of phylogenetic trees
File(s)Jombart_et_al-2017-Molecular_Ecology_Resources.pdf (1.27 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Jombart, T
Kendall, M
Almagro-Garcia, J
Colijn, C
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The increasing availability of large genomic data sets as well as the advent of Bayesian phylogenetics facilitates the investigation of phylogenetic incongruence, which can result in the impossibility of representing phylogenetic relationships using a single tree. While sometimes considered as a nuisance, phylogenetic incongruence can also reflect meaningful biological processes as well as relevant statistical uncertainty, both of which can yield valuable insights in evolutionary studies. We introduce a new tool for investigating phylogenetic incongruence through the exploration of phylogenetic tree landscapes. Our approach, implemented in the R package treespace, combines tree metrics and multivariate analysis to provide low-dimensional representations of the topological variability in a set of trees, which can be used for identifying clusters of similar trees and group-specific consensus phylogenies. treespace also provides a user-friendly web interface for interactive data analysis and is integrated alongside existing standards for phylogenetics. It fills a gap in the current phylogenetics toolbox in R and will facilitate the investigation of phylogenetic results.
Date Issued
2017-05-15
Date Acceptance
2017-03-21
Citation
Molecular Ecology Resources, 2017, 17 (6), pp.1385-1392
ISSN
1755-0998
Publisher
Wiley
Start Page
1385
End Page
1392
Journal / Book Title
Molecular Ecology Resources
Volume
17
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
© 2017 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Resources Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Grant Number
EP/K026003/1
MR/K010174/1B
Subjects
incongruence
multivariate analysis
package
software
tree distances
tree metric
06 Biological Sciences
Evolutionary Biology
Publication Status
Published