page_title: Molecular phylogenetics
section_title: Molecular phylogenetic analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Molecular phylogenetics / Molecular phylogenetic analysis
caption_attribution_description: English: Flow Chart of the Five Stages of Molecular Phylogenetic Analysis as per Pevsner, J. (2015).
context_page_description: Molecular phylogenetics is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominately in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to determine the processes by which diversity among species has been achieved. The result of a molecular phylogenetic analysis is expressed in a phylogenetic tree. Molecular phylogenetics is one aspect of molecular systematics, a broader term that also includes the use of molecular data in taxonomy and biogeography.
  Molecular phylogenetics and molecular evolution correlate. Molecular evolution is the process of selective changes at a molecular level throughout various branches in the tree of life. Molecular phylogenetics makes inferences of the evolutionary relationships that arise due to molecular evolution and results in the construction of a phylogenetic tree. The figure displayed on the right depicts the phylogenetic tree of life as one of the first detailed trees, according to information known in the 1870s by Haeckel.
context_section_description: There are several methods available for performing a molecular phylogenetic analysis. One method, including a comprehensive step-by-step protocol on constructing a phylogenetic tree, including DNA/Amino Acid contiguous sequence assembly, multiple sequence alignment, model-test (testing best-fitting substitution models), and phylogeny reconstruction using Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Inference, is available at Nature Protocol.
  Another molecular phylogenetic analysis technique has been described by Pevsner and shall be summarized in the sentences to follow (Pevsner, 2015). A phylogenetic analysis typically consists of five major steps. The first stage comprises sequence acquisition. The following step consists of performing a multiple sequence alignment, which is the fundamental basis of constructing a phylogenetic tree. The third stage includes different models of DNA and amino acid substitution. Several models of substitution exist. A few examples include Hamming distance, the Jukes and Cantor one-parameter model, and the Kimura two-parameter model (see Models of DNA evolution). The fourth stage consists of various methods of tree building, including distance-based and character-based methods. The normalized Hamming distance and the Jukes-Cantor correction formulas provide the degree of divergence and the probability that a nucleotide changes to another, respectively. Common tree-building methods include unweighted pair group method using arithmetic mean (UPGMA) and Neighbor joining, which are distance-based methods, Maximum parsimony, which is a character-based method, and Maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian inference, which are character-based/model-based methods. UPGMA is a simple method; however, it is less accurate than the neighbor-joining approach. Finally, the last step comprises evaluating the trees. This assessment of accuracy is composed of consistency, efficiency, and robustness.
  MEGA (molecular evolutionary genetics analysis) is an analysis software that is user-friendly and free to download and use. This software is capable of analyzing both distance-based and character-based tree methodologies. MEGA also contains several options one may choose to utilize, such as heuristic approaches and bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is an approach that is commonly used to measure the robustness of topology in a phylogenetic tree, which demonstrates the percentage each clade is supported after numerous replicates. In general, a value greater than 70% is considered significant. The flow chart displayed on the right visually demonstrates the order of the five stages of Pevsner's molecular phylogenetic analysis technique that have been described.
caption: Five Stages of Molecular Phylogenetic Analysis
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