The evolutionary history of a set of taxa is usually represented by a phylogenetic tree, and this model has greatly facilitated the discussion and testing of hypotheses. However, it is well known that more complex evolutionary scenarios are poorly described by such models. Further, even when evolution proceeds in a tree-like manner, analysis of the data may not be best served by using methods that enforce a tree structure but rather by a richer visualization of the data to evaluate its properties, at least as an essential first step. Thus, phylogenetic networks should be employed when reticulate events such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, or gene duplication and loss are believed to be involved, and, even in the absence of such events, phylogenetic networks have a useful role to play. This article reviews the terminology used for phylogenetic networks and covers both split networks and reticulate networks, how they are defined, and how they can be interpreted. Additionally, the article outlines the beginnings of a comprehensive statistical framework for applying split network methods. We show how split networks can represent confidence sets of trees and introduce a conservative statistical test for whether the conflicting signal in a network is treelike. Finally, this article describes a new program, SplitsTree4, an interactive and comprehensive tool for inferring different types of phylogenetic networks from sequences, distances, and trees.

https://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/~easychair/HusonBryant_MBE_2006.pdf

Application of Phylogenetic Networks in Evolutionary Studies

BOLD: The Barcode of Life Data System: Barcoding

Gene families are growing rapidly, but standard methods for inferring phylogenies do not scale to alignments with over 10,000 sequences. We present FastTree, a method for constructing large phylogenies and for estimating their reliability. Instead of storing a distance matrix, FastTree stores sequence profiles of internal nodes in the tree. FastTree uses these profiles to implement Neighbor-Joining and uses heuristics to quickly identify candidate joins. FastTree then uses nearest neighbor interchanges to reduce the length of the tree. For an alignment with N sequences, L sites, and a different characters, a distance matrix requires O(N2) space and O(N2L) time, but FastTree requires just O(NLa + N) memory and O(Nlog (N)La) time. To estimate the tree's reliability, FastTree uses local bootstrapping, which gives another 100-fold speedup over a distance matrix. For example, FastTree computed a tree and support values for 158,022 distinct 16S ribosomal RNAs in 17 h and 2.4 GB of memory. Just computing pairwise Jukes–Cantor distances and storing them, without inferring a tree or bootstrapping, would require 17 h and 50 GB of memory. In simulations, FastTree was slightly more accurate than Neighbor-Joining, BIONJ, or FastME; on genuine alignments, FastTree's topologies had higher likelihoods. FastTree is available at http://microbesonline.org/fasttree.

/pdf/fasttree-computing-large-minimum-evolution-trees-with-eo2tre5l8r.pdf

FastTree: Computing Large Minimum Evolution Trees with Profiles instead of a Distance Matrix

Gene families are growing rapidly, but standard methods for inferring phylogenies do not scale to alignments with over 10,000 sequences. We present FastTree, a method for constructing large phylogenies and for estimating their reliability. Instead of storing a distance matrix, FastTree stores sequence profiles of internal nodes in the tree. FastTree uses these profiles to implement neighbor-joining and uses heuristics to quickly identify candidate joins. FastTree then uses nearest-neighbor interchanges to reduce the length of the tree. For an alignment with N sequences, L sites, and a different characters, a distance matrix requires O(N^2) space and O(N^2 L) time, but FastTree requires just O( NLa + N sqrt(N) ) memory and O( N sqrt(N) log(N) L a ) time. To estimate the tree's reliability, FastTree uses local bootstrapping, which gives another 100-fold speedup over a distance matrix. For example, FastTree computed a tree and support values for 158,022 distinct 16S ribosomal RNAs in 17 hours and 2.4 gigabytes of memory. Just computing pairwise Jukes-Cantor distances and storing them, without inferring a tree or bootstrapping, would require 17 hours and 50 gigabytes of memory. In simulations, FastTree was slightly more accurate than neighbor joining, BIONJ, or FastME; on genuine alignments, FastTree's topologies had higher likelihoods. FastTree is available at http://microbesonline.org/fasttree.

/pdf/fast-tree-computing-large-minimum-evolution-trees-with-4grq0gwfpy.pdf

Fast Tree: Computing Large Minimum-Evolution Trees with Profiles instead of a Distance Matrix

The Barcode of Life Data System ( BOLD ) is an informatics workbench aiding the acquisition, storage, analysis and publication of DNA barcode records. By assembling molecular, morphological and distributional data, it bridges a traditional bioinformatics chasm. BOLD is freely available to any researcher with interests in DNA barcoding. By providing specialized services, it aids the assembly of records that meet the standards needed to gain BARCODE designation in the global sequence databases. Because of its web-based delivery and flexible data security model, it is also well positioned to support projects that involve broad research alliances. This paper provides a brief introduction to the key elements of BOLD , discusses their functional capabilities, and concludes by examining computational resources and future prospects.

/pdf/bold-the-barcode-of-life-data-system-www-barcodinglife-org-11xa2bq3ju.pdf

BOLD : The Barcode of Life Data System (www.barcodinglife.org)

We present algorithms for finding a longest common increasing subsequence of two or more input sequences. For two sequences of lengths m and n, where m≥n, we present an algorithm with an output-dependent expected running time of $O((m+n\ell) \log\log \sigma + {\ensuremath{\mathit{Sort}}})$ and O(m) space, where l is the length of an LCIS, σ is the size of the alphabet, and ${\ensuremath{\mathit{Sort}}}$ is the time to sort each input sequence. For k≥3 length-n sequences we present an algorithm which improves the previous best bound by more than a factor k for many inputs. In both cases, our algorithms are conceptually quite simple but rely on existing sophisticated data structures. Finally, we introduce the problem of longest common weakly-increasing (or non-decreasing) subsequences (LCWIS), for which we present an O(m+nlogn)-time algorithm for the 3-letter alphabet case. For the extensively studied longest common subsequence problem, comparable speedups have not been achieved for small alphabets.

Faster algorithms for computing longest common increasing subsequences

Algorithms dealing with massive data sets are usually designed for I/O-efficiency, often captured by the I/O model by Aggarwal and Vitter. Another aspect of dealing with massive data is how to deal with memory faults, e.g. captured by the adversary based faulty memory RAM by Finocchi and Italiano. However, current fault tolerant algorithms do not scale beyond the internal memory. In this paper we investigate for the first time the connection between I/O-efficiency in the I/O model and fault tolerance in the faulty memory RAM, and we assume that both memory and disk are unreliable. We show a lower bound on the number of I/Os required for any deterministic dictionary that is resilient to memory faults. We design a static and a dynamic deterministic dictionary with optimal query performance as well as an optimal sorting algorithm and an optimal priority queue. Finally, we consider scenarios where only cells in memory or only cells on disk are corruptible and separate randomized and deterministic dictionaries in the latter.

/pdf/fault-tolerant-external-memory-algorithms-511a9royiv.pdf

Fault Tolerant External Memory Algorithms

The complexity of maintaining a set under the operations Insert, Delete and FindMin is considered In the comparison model it is shown that any randomized algorithm with expected amortized cost t comparisons per Insert and Delete has expected cost at least n/(e22t)-1 comparisons for FindMin If FindMin is replaced by a weaker operation FindAny, then it is shown that a randomized algorithm with constant expected cost per operation exists; in contrast, it is shown that no deterministic algorithm can have constant cost per operation Finally, a deterministic algorithm with constant amortized cost per operation for an offline version of the problem is given

The randomized complexity of maintaining the minimum

Reconstructing the evolutionary tree for a set of n species based on pairwise distances between the species is a fundamental problem in bioinformatics. Neighbor joining is a popular distance based tree reconstruction method. It always proposes fully resolved binary trees despite missing evidence in the underlying distance data. Distance based methods based on the theory of Buneman trees and refined Buneman trees avoid this problem by only proposing evolutionary trees whose edges satisfy a number of constraints. These trees might not be fully resolved but there is strong combinatorial evidence for each proposed edge. The currently best algorithm for computing the refined Buneman tree from a given distance measure has a running time of O(n 5) and a space consumption of O(n 4). In this paper, we present an algorithm with running time O(n 3) and space consumption O(n 2). The improved complexity of our algorithm makes the method of refined Buneman trees computational competitive to methods based on neighbor joining.

Computing Refined Buneman Trees in Cubic Time

The two dimensional range minimum query problem is to preprocess a static two dimensional m by n array A of size N = m ċ n, such that subsequent queries, asking for the position of the minimum element in a rectangular range within A, can be answered efficiently. We study the trade-off between the space and query time of the problem. We show that every algorithm enabled to access A during the query and using O(N/c) bits additional space requires Ω(c) query time, for any c where 1 ≤ c ≤ N. This lower bound holds for any dimension. In particular, for the one dimensional version of the problem, the lower bound is tight up to a constant factor. In two dimensions, we complement the lower bound with an indexing data structure of size O(N/c) bits additional space which can be preprocessed in O(N) time and achieves O(c log2 c) query time. For c = O(1), this is the first O(1) query time algorithm using optimal O(N) bits additional space. For the case where queries can not probe A, we give a data structure of size O(N ċ min{m, log n}) bits with O(1) query time, assuming m ≤ n. This leaves a gap to the lower bound of Ω(N log m) bits for this version of the problem.

Gerth Stølting Brodal

Papers

Faster algorithms for computing longest common increasing subsequences

Fault Tolerant External Memory Algorithms

The randomized complexity of maintaining the minimum

Computing Refined Buneman Trees in Cubic Time

On space efficient two dimensional range minimum data structures