Phylogenies from amino acid sequences aligned with gaps: The problem of gap weighting

Summary The common but generally overlooked problem of how best to construct phylogenies from orthologous amino acid sequences, when their alignment requires the placement therein of gaps denoting insertions/deletions in the evolutionary history of their genes since their common ancestor, has been studied. Three diverse methods were examined: 1. each missing residue in a gap is weighted as equivalent to the average number of minimum nucleotide replacements in known conjugate amino acid pairs of those same two sequences, which weight necessarily differs for each pair of sequences; 2. each missing residue in a gap is weighted as equivalent to a fixed number of nucleotide replacements; and 3. each gap, regardless of length, is weighted as equivalent to a fixed number of nucleotide replacements. For the flavodoxins, each method yielded a different best tree and suggests that the choice of method may be crucial. For the plant ferredoxins, all methods give results inconsistent with botanical classification and suggests the sequences may not all be orthologous. For the bacterial ferredoxins, the method was less germane than the actual weight used, five different best trees being obtained depending upon the weight. The best tree for all ferredoxins (prokaryotic plus eukaryotic) combined proved to be greatly dependent upon the gap locations with several reasonable alignments yielding different best trees. They also suggest that functional equivalence may well prove to be a poor guide to which residues have a common ancestral codon. The rubredoxin sequences show that a partial internal gene duplication occurred in thePseudomonas line, probably very soon after its divergence from the other genera. Together, the results clearly indicate that the phylogenetic answer one gets may greatly depend upon how one treats the gaps but they fail to indicate what treatment may be best. This results partly from the fact that the phylogenies of the taxa represented are not known with sufficient confidence to be sure when the procedures are performing best.     

单管直扩38重祖先信息InDels体系的构建及其在微流控芯片系统的应用

本文基于插入-缺失多态性(insertion-deletion polymorphism,InDel)遗传标记,从相关文献和dbSNP库中筛选出38个在东亚、欧洲、非洲人群中具有等位基因频率差异的祖先来源InDel位点,同时整合Amelogenin位点和Y染色体STR(DYS439)位点,以辅助未知样本的性别鉴定,采用PCR-CE技术构建了可以区分三大洲际人群的单管直接扩增复合检测体系,该体系可与微流控芯片系统相结合,1.7 h内完成DNA样本自动化扩增和电泳分型,利用公共数据库1000Genomes中16个人群1 607名个体的分型数据对筛选的38个InDel位点进行初步评估;同时对构建的38-plex InDels体系的灵敏度、准确性、直接扩增能力进行验证评估;检测5种不同人群的779份样本和215份唾液卡、血卡的直接扩增样本,采用聚类分析和主成分分析方法,评价体系的推断准确性.结果表明该38-plex InDels复合检测体系分型准确,灵敏度达157 pg,能够对唾液卡和血卡直接扩增,可以区分三大洲际人群及其混合人群,能够准确推断待测样本的族群来源、估算祖先成分,且通过集成细胞裂解步骤将有望2h实现"样本进-结果出"式快速自动化InDel分型.