Who is Who in Phylogenetic Networks

Publications of Mark A. Ragan     Order by:   Type | Year

Associated keywords

abstract-network explicit-network phylogenetic-network phylogeny survey visualization

2009

1 Robert G. Beiko and Mark A. Ragan. Untangling Hybrid Phylogenetic Signals: Horizontal Gene Transfer and Artifacts of Phylogenetic Reconstruction. In Horizontal Gene Transfer, Vol. 532:241-256 of Methods in Molecular Biology, 2009. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60327-853-9_14.         Toggle abstract "Phylogenomic methods can be used to investigate the tangled evolutionary relationships among genomes. Building 'all the trees of all the genes' can potentially identify common pathways of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) among taxa at varying levels of phylogenetic depth. Phylogenetic affinities can be aggregated and merged with the information about genetic linkage and biochemical function to examine hypotheses of adaptive evolution via HGT. Additionally, the use of many genetic data sets increases the power of statistical tests for phylogenetic artifacts. However, large-scale phylogenetic analyses pose several challenges, including the necessary abandonment of manual validation techniques, the need to translate inferred phylogenetic discordance into inferred HGT events, and the challenges involved in aggregating results from search-based inference methods. In this chapter we describe a tree search procedure to recover the most parsimonious pathways of HGT, and examine some of the assumptions that are made by this method." 2 Mark A. Ragan. Trees and networks before and after Darwin. In Biology Direct, Vol. 4(43), 2009. Keywords: abstract network, explicit network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, survey, visualization. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1745-6150-4-43.         Toggle abstract "It is well-known that Charles Darwin sketched abstract trees of relationship in his 1837 notebook, and depicted a tree in the Origin of Species (1859). Here I attempt to place Darwin's trees in historical context. By the mid-Eighteenth century the Great Chain of Being was increasingly seen to be an inadequate description of order in nature, and by about 1780 it had been largely abandoned without a satisfactory alternative having been agreed upon. In 1750 Donati described aquatic and terrestrial organisms as forming a network, and a few years later Buffon depicted a network of genealogical relationships among breeds of dogs. In 1764 Bonnet asked whether the Chain might actually branch at certain points, and in 1766 Pallas proposed that the gradations among organisms resemble a tree with a compound trunk, perhaps not unlike the tree of animal life later depicted by Eichwald. Other trees were presented by Augier in 1801 and by Lamarck in 1809 and 1815, the latter two assuming a transmutation of species over time. Elaborate networks of affinities among plants and among animals were depicted in the late Eighteenth and very early Nineteenth centuries. In the two decades immediately prior to 1837, so-called affinities and/or analogies among organisms were represented by diverse geometric figures. Series of plant and animal fossils in successive geological strata were represented as trees in a popular textbook from 1840, while in 1858 Bronn presented a system of animals, as evidenced by the fossil record, in a form of a tree. Darwin's 1859 tree and its subsequent elaborations by Haeckel came to be accepted in many but not all areas of biological sciences, while network diagrams were used in others. Beginning in the early 1960s trees were inferred from protein and nucleic acid sequences, but networks were re-introduced in the mid-1990s to represent lateral genetic transfer, increasingly regarded as a fundamental mode of evolution at least for bacteria and archaea. In historical context, then, the Network of Life preceded the Tree of Life and might again supersede it. Reviewers: This article was reviewed by Eric Bapteste, Patrick Forterre and Dan Graur. © 2009 Ragan; licensee BioMed Central Ltd."