Seeing the forest for the trees: the limitations of phylogenies in comparative biology. (American Society of Naturalists Address)

The past 30 years have seen a revolution in comparative biology. Before that time, systematics was not at the forefront of the biological sciences, and few scientists considered phylogenetic relationships when investigating evolutionary questions. By contrast, systematic biology is now one of the most vigorous disciplines in biology, and the use of phylogenies not only is requisite in macroevolutionary studies but also has been applied to a wide range of topics and fields that no one could possibly have envisioned 30 years ago. My message is simple: phylogenies are fundamental to comparative biology, but they are not the be-all and end-all. Phylogenies are powerful tools for understanding the past, but like any tool, they have their limitations. In addition, phylogenies are much more informative about pattern than they are about process. The best way to fully understand the past-both pattern and process-is to integrate phylogenies with other types of historical data as well as with direct studies of evolutionary process.     

Closure operations in phylogenetics

Closure operations are a useful device in both the theory and practice of tree reconstruction in biology and other areas of classification. These operations take a collection of trees (rooted or unrooted) that classify overlapping sets of objects at their leaves, and infer further tree-like relationships. In this paper we investigate closure operations on phylogenetic trees; both rooted and unrooted; as well as on X-splits, and in a general abstract setting. We derive a number of new results, particularly concerning the completeness (and incompleteness) and complexity of various types of closure rules.     

Gene trees and species trees – mutual influences and interdependences of population genetics and systematics

Both population genetics and systematics are core disciplines of evolutionary biology. While systematics deals with genealogical relationships among taxa, population genetics has mainly been based on allele frequencies and the distribution of genetic variants whose genealogical relations could for a long time, due mainly to methodological constraints, not be inferred. The advent of mitochondrial DNA analyses and modern sequencing techniques in the 1970s revolutionized evolutionary genetic studies and gave rise to molecular phylogenetics. In the wake of this new development systematic approaches and principles were incorporated into intraspecific studies at the population level, e.g. the concept of monophyly which is used to delineate evolutionarily significant units in conservation biology. A new discipline combining phylogenetic analyses of genetic lineages with their geographic distribution ('phylogeography') was introduced as an explicit synthesis of population genetics and systematics. On the other hand, it has increasingly become obvious that discordances between gene trees and species trees not only result from spurious data sets or methodological flaws in phylogenetic analyses, but that they often reflect real population genetic processes such as lineage sorting or hybridization. These processes have to be taken into account when evaluating the reliability of gene trees to avoid wrong phylogenetic conclusions. The present review focuses on the phenomenon of non-phylogenetic sorting of ancestral polymorphisms, its probability and its consequences for molecular systematics.     

Unrooted trees discovered independently in philology and phylogenetics: a remarkable case of methodological convergence

We report on the only known case of independent discovery of unrooted trees in a historical science outside of biological systematics. The method of textual criticism (ecdotics, i.e., the building of text-version genealogies) created by French philologist Henri Quentin (1872–1935) proposes the use of a type of branching scheme equivalent to unrooted trees in phylogenetics. Because Quentin's method has never become the prevailing paradigm in philology, his insight into unrooted trees has not been noticed in previous studies comparing philology and phylogenetics. In fact, the modern use of unrooted trees in philology is seen as imported from phylogenetics. Quentin's procedure starts by building an unrooted tree (‘chain’) expressing the network of text versions (taxa) based on ‘variants’ (equivalent to unpolarized character states). Such undirected scheme is then rooted on the basis of extrinsic temporal information, thus resulting in a complete (rooted) hypothesis of relationships. Quentin asserts that the building of an unrooted tree precedes the determination of its orientation (rooting) and that the two procedures reflect distinct levels of structural organization, relying on different assumptions. Henri Quentin fully grasped the implications of time-reversible properties of unrooted trees and associated characters, in striking prescience of the same concepts developed in phylogenetics some 45 years later. The two versions of unrooted trees were developed entirely independently of each other and such convergence is testimony to the formal efficiency of approaching historical reconstruction in unrooted and rooted dimensions.     

Quartets and unrooted phylogenetic networks

Phylogenetic networks were introduced to describe evolution in the presence of exchanges of genetic material between coexisting species or individuals. Split networks in particular were introduced as a special kind of abstract network to visualize conflicts between phylogenetic trees which may correspond to such exchanges. More recently, methods were designed to reconstruct explicit phylogenetic networks (whose vertices can be interpreted as biological events) from triplet data. In this article, we link abstract and explicit networks through their combinatorial properties, by introducing the unrooted analog of level-k networks. In particular, we give an equivalence theorem between circular split systems and unrooted level-1 networks. We also show how to adapt to quartets some existing results on triplets, in order to reconstruct unrooted level-k phylogenetic networks. These results give an interesting perspective on the combinatorics of phylogenetic networks and also raise algorithmic and combinatorial questions.     

How to Read a Phylogenetic Tree

It has been over 50 years since Willi Hennig proposed a new method for determining genealogical relationships among species, which he called phylogenetic systematics. Many people, however, still approach the method warily, worried that they will have to grapple with an overwhelming number of new terms and concepts. In fact, reading and understanding phylogenetic trees is really not difficult at all. You only need to learn three new words, autapomorphy, synapomorphy, and plesiomorphy. All of the other concepts (e.g., ancestors, monophyletic groups, paraphyletic groups) are familiar ones that were already part of Darwinian evolution before Hennig arrived on the scene.     

Modularity of trophic network is driven by phylogeny and migration in a steppe ecosystem

Evidence is mounting that the structures of trophic networks are governed by migratory movements of interacting species and also by their phylogenetic relationships. Using the largest available trophic network of a large steppe ecosystem, we tested that steppe trophic networks including migratory species are associated with (i) migratory strategy and (ii) phylogenetic relatedness of interacting species: (1) whole graph-level metrics, estimated as modularity, and (2) species-level network metrics, measured as node degree (number of interacting partners), and centrality metrics. We found that (1) a substantial number of links were established by migrant taxa; (2) the phylogenetic signal in network structure was moderate for both consumer and prey nodes; (3) both consumer and prex phylogenies affected modularity, which was modulated by migration strategy; and (4) all species-level graph properties significantly differed between networks including and excluding migratory taxa. In sum, here we show that the structure of steppe trophic networks is primarily governed by migratory strategies and to a lesser extent, by phylogenetic relatedness, using the largest available food web representative for steppe ecology and migration biology.     

Euclidean nature of phylogenetic distance matrices

Phylogenies are fundamental to comparative biology as they help to identify independent events on which statistical tests rely. Two groups of phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) can be distinguished: those that take phylogenies into account by introducing explicit models of evolution and those that only consider phylogenies as a statistical constraint and aim at partitioning trait values into a phylogenetic component (phylogenetic inertia) and one or multiple specific components related to adaptive evolution. The way phylogenetic information is incorporated into the PCMs depends on the method used. For the first group of methods, phylogenies are converted into variance-covariance matrices of traits following a given model of evolution such as Brownian motion (BM). For the second group of methods, phylogenies are converted into distance matrices that are subsequently transformed into Euclidean distances to perform principal coordinate analyses. Here, we show that simply taking the elementwise square root of a distance matrix extracted from a phylogenetic tree ensures having a Euclidean distance matrix. This is true for any type of distances between species (patristic or nodal) and also for trees harboring multifurcating nodes. Moreover, we illustrate that this simple transformation using the square root imposes less geometric distortion than more complex transformations classically used in the literature such as the Cailliez method. Given the Euclidean nature of the elementwise square root of phylogenetic distance matrices, the positive semidefinitiveness of the phylogenetic variance-covariance matrix of a trait following a BM model, or related models of trait evolution, can be established. In that way, we build a bridge between the two groups of statistical methods widely used in comparative analysis. These results should be of great interest for ecologists and evolutionary biologists performing statistical analyses incorporating phylogenies.     

利用肠道菌群的分布和16S DNA序列研究鲤科肠道菌系统演化关系

肠道微生物与寄主具有复杂的、多方面的相互依存效应,这种依存效应所产生的共生关系或协同进化关系既可反映寄主间的系统演化关系,也可显示肠道微生物间的系统演化关系,共生关系或协同进化关系是由于寄主与肠道微生物两者之间存在着相互自然选择作用所形成的,在长期的进化历程中逐步发生的共生关系信息很可能被记录在DNA序列中。本文通过检测鱼鲤鱼科8种鱼中9种肠道菌群的分布含量对这9种菌群进行分析,且利用从GenBank调取这9种肠道细菌菌属的43个种或亚种的16S DNA序列的构建NJ树和MP树,将这6个科9个属43个种或亚种分为革兰氏阴性和革兰氏阳性两大类群（一级分枝）。在这两类群中,又以科为单位分为6个亚类群（二级分枝）,而肠杆菌科中则以属为单位分为4个小类群（三级分枝）,此外球状菌与杆状菌也能截然分开。将16S DNA的NJ树隐去所有的种,以属为单位所得到的以分枝形式的无根树在拓扑结构上与菌群分布含量（寄主范围）所构建的无根树相近,但芽孢杆菌在两种无根树的位置中有较大的差异。如果提高检测水平,扩大所检测的寄主对象,这种差异有可能消除。     

Multiple nuclear gene sequences identify phylogenetic species boundaries in the rapidly radiating clade of Mexican ambystomatid salamanders

Delimiting the boundaries of species involved in radiations is critical to understanding the tempo and mode of lineage formation. Single locus gene trees may or may not reflect the underlying pattern of population divergence and lineage formation, yet they constitute the vast majority of the empirical data in species radiations. In this study we make use of an expressed sequence tag (EST) database to perform nuclear (nDNA) and mitochondrial (mtDNA) genealogical tests of species boundaries in Ambystoma ordinarium, a member of an adaptive radiation of metamorphic and paedomorphic salamanders (the Ambystoma tigrinum complex) that have diversified across terrestrial and aquatic environments. Gene tree comparisons demonstrate extensive nonmonophyly in the mtDNA genealogy of A. ordinarium, while seven of eight independent nuclear loci resolve the species as monophyletic or nearly so, and diagnose it as a well-resolved genealogical species. A differential introgression hypothesis is supported by the observation that western A. ordinarium localities contain mtDNA haplotypes that are identical or minimally diverged from haplotypes sampled from a nearby paedomorphic species, Ambystoma dumerilii, while most nDNA trees place these species in distant phylogenetic positions. These results provide a strong example of how historical introgression can lead to radical differences between gene trees and species histories, even among currently allopatric species with divergent life history adaptations and morphologies. They also demonstrate how EST-based nuclear resources can be used to more fully resolve the phylogenetic history of species radiations.     

Phylogenomic networks

Phylogenomics is aimed at studying functional and evolutionary aspects of genome biology using phylogenetic analysis of whole genomes. Current approaches to genome phylogenies are commonly founded in terms of phylogenetic trees. However, several evolutionary processes are non tree-like in nature, including recombination and lateral gene transfer (LGT). Phylogenomic networks are a special type of phylogenetic network reconstructed from fully sequenced genomes. The network model, comprising genomes connected by pairwise evolutionary relations, enables the reconstruction of both vertical and LGT events. Modeling genome evolution in the form of a network enables the use of an extensive toolbox developed for network research. The structural properties of phylogenomic networks open up fundamentally new insights into genome evolution.     

Drawing Rooted Phylogenetic Networks

The evolutionary history of a collection of species is usually represented by a phylogenetic tree. Sometimes, phylogenetic networks are used as a means of representing reticulate evolution or of showing uncertainty and incompatibilities in evolutionary datasets. This is often done using unrooted phylogenetic networks such as split networks, due in part, to the availability of software (SplitsTree) for their computation and visualization. In this paper we discuss the problem of drawing rooted phylogenetic networks as cladograms or phylograms in a number of different views that are commonly used for rooted trees. Implementations of the algorithms are available in new releases of the Dendroscope and SplitsTree programs.     

The roots of phylogeny: how did Haeckel build his trees?

Haeckel created much of our current vocabulary in evolutionary biology, such as the term phylogeny, which is currently used to designate trees. Assuming that Haeckel gave the same meaning to this term, one often reproduces Haeckel's trees as the first illustrations of phylogenetic trees. A detailed analysis of Haeckel's own evolutionary vocabulary and theory revealed that Haeckel's trees were genealogical trees and that Haeckel's phylogeny was a morphological concept. However, phylogeny was actually the core of Haeckel's tree reconstruction, and understanding the exact meaning Haeckel gave to phylogeny is crucial to understanding the information Haeckel wanted to convey in his famous trees. Haeckel's phylogeny was a linear series of main morphological stages along the line of descent of a given species. The phylogeny of a single species would provide a trunk around which lateral branches were added as mere ornament; the phylogeny selected for drawing a tree of a given group was considered the most complete line of progress from lower to higher forms of this group, such as the phylogeny of Man for the genealogical tree of Vertebrates. Haeckel's phylogeny was mainly inspired by the idea of the scala naturae, or scale of being. Therefore, Haeckel's genealogical trees, which were only branched on the surface, mainly represented the old idea of scale of being. Even though Haeckel decided to draw genealogical trees after reading On the Origin of Species and was called the German Darwin, he did not draw Darwinian branching diagrams. Although Haeckel always saw Lamarck, Goethe, and Darwin as the three fathers of the theory of evolution, he was mainly influenced by Lamarck and Goethe in his approach to tree reconstruction.     

How to Identify and Interpret Evolutionary Tree Diagrams

Evolutionary trees are key tools for modern biology and are commonly portrayed in textbooks to promote learning about biological evolution. However, many people have difficulty in understanding what evolutionary trees are meant to portray. In fact, some ideas that current professional biologists depict with evolutionary trees are neither clearly defined nor conveyed to students. To help biology teachers and students learn how to more deeply interpret, understand and gain knowledge from diagrams that represent ancestor–descendant relationships and evolutionary lineages, we describe the different rooted and unrooted evolutionary tree visualisations and explain how they are best read. Examples from a study of tree-shaped diagrams in the journal Science are used to illustrate how to distinguish evolutionary trees from other tree-shaped representations that are easily misunderstood as visualising evolutionary relationships. We end by making recommendations for how our findings may be implemented in teaching practice in this important area of biology education.     

Uprooted Phylogenetic Networks

The need for structures capable of accommodating complex evolutionary signals such as those found in, for example, wheat has fueled research into phylogenetic networks. Such structures generalize the standard model of a phylogenetic tree by also allowing for cycles and have been introduced in rooted and unrooted form. In contrast to phylogenetic trees or their unrooted versions, rooted phylogenetic networks are notoriously difficult to understand. To help alleviate this, recent work on them has also centered on their “uprooted” versions. By focusing on such graphs and the combinatorial concept of a split system which underpins an unrooted phylogenetic network, we show that not only can a so-called (uprooted) 1-nested network N be obtained from the Buneman graph (sometimes also called a median network) associated with the split system \(\Sigma (N)\) induced on the set of leaves of N but also that that graph is, in a well-defined sense, optimal. Along the way, we establish the 1-nested analogue of the fundamental “splits equivalence theorem” for phylogenetic trees and characterize maximal circular split systems.     

Phylogenetic approaches in coevolution and biogeography

I review phylogenetic approaches to problems in coevolution and biogeography, illustrating with case studies. In coevolution, genealogical trees are essential in differentiating between ancient and recent associations, in identifying cospeciation events, and in studying host-switching patterns. Cospeciating associations are of particular interest because they allow powerful tests of molecular clocks and accurate comparison of evolutionary rates across groups of organisms. In biogeography, phylogenies can help reconstruct the distribution history of individual groups and identify past geological events that have affected the evolution of entire communities. Parsimony analysis in coevolution and biogeography should be based on identification of different types of events, each of which is associated with a specific cost. Similar event-based methods are applicable to coevolutionary and biogeographic inference, as well as in the mapping of gene trees onto organism trees. The discussed examples span a variety of organisms and spatiotemporal scales: primate pin worms, HIV, pocket gophers and their lice, aphids and their bacterial symbionts, gall wasps and their host plants, the root of the tree of life, the historical biogeography of the Holarctic, and the geographical origin of our own species.     

Integrated gene and species phylogenies from unaligned whole genome protein sequences

MOTIVATION: Most molecular phylogenies are based on sequence alignments. Consequently, they fail to account for modes of sequence evolution that involve frequent insertions or deletions. Here we present a method for generating accurate gene and species phylogenies from whole genome sequence that makes use of short character string matches not placed within explicit alignments. In this work, the singular value decomposition of a sparse tetrapeptide frequency matrix is used to represent the proteins of organisms uniquely and precisely as vectors in a high-dimensional space. Vectors of this kind can be used to calculate pairwise distance values based on the angle separating the vectors, and the resulting distance values can be used to generate phylogenetic trees. Protein trees so derived can be examined directly for homologous sequences. Alternatively, vectors defining each of the proteins within an organism can be summed to provide a vector representation of the organism, which is then used to generate species trees. RESULTS: Using a large mitochondrial genome dataset, we have produced species trees that are largely in agreement with previously published trees based on the analysis of identical datasets using different methods. These trees also agree well with currently accepted phylogenetic theory. In principle, our method could be used to compare much larger bacterial or nuclear genomes in full molecular detail, ultimately allowing accurate gene and species relationships to be derived from a comprehensive comparison of complete genomes. In contrast to phylogenetic methods based on alignments, sequences that evolve by relative insertion or deletion would tend to remain recognizably similar.