scholarly journals Practical Speedup of Bayesian Inference of Species Phylogenies by Restricting the Space of Gene Trees

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 1809-1818
Author(s):  
Yaxuan Wang ◽  
Huw A Ogilvie ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

Abstract Species tree inference from multilocus data has emerged as a powerful paradigm in the postgenomic era, both in terms of the accuracy of the species tree it produces as well as in terms of elucidating the processes that shaped the evolutionary history. Bayesian methods for species tree inference are desirable in this area as they have been shown not only to yield accurate estimates, but also to naturally provide measures of confidence in those estimates. However, the heavy computational requirements of Bayesian inference have limited the applicability of such methods to very small data sets. In this article, we show that the computational efficiency of Bayesian inference under the multispecies coalescent can be improved in practice by restricting the space of the gene trees explored during the random walk, without sacrificing accuracy as measured by various metrics. The idea is to first infer constraints on the trees of the individual loci in the form of unresolved gene trees, and then to restrict the sampler to consider only resolutions of the constrained trees. We demonstrate the improvements gained by such an approach on both simulated and biological data.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaxuan Wang ◽  
Huw A. Ogilvie ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

AbstractSpecies tree inference from multi-locus data has emerged as a powerful paradigm in the post-genomic era, both in terms of the accuracy of the species tree it produces as well as in terms of elucidating the processes that shaped the evolutionary history. Bayesian methods for species tree inference are desirable in this area as they have been shown to yield accurate estimates, but also to naturally provide measures of confidence in those estimates. However, the heavy computational requirements of Bayesian inference have limited the applicability of such methods to very small data sets.In this paper, we show that the computational efficiency of Bayesian inference under the multispecies coalescent can be improved in practice by restricting the space of the gene trees explored during the random walk, without sacrificing accuracy as measured by various metrics. The idea is to first infer constraints on the trees of the individual loci in the form of unresolved gene trees, and then to restrict the sampler to consider only resolutions of the constrained trees. We demonstrate the improvements gained by such an approach on both simulated and biological data.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhi Yan ◽  
Peng Du ◽  
Matthew W. Hahn ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

AbstractThe multispecies coalescent (MSC) has emerged as a powerful and desirable framework for species tree inference in phylogenomic studies. Under this framework, the data for each locus is assumed to consist of orthologous, single-copy genes, and heterogeneity across loci is assumed to be due to incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). These assumptions have led biologists that use ILS-aware inference methods, whether based directly on the MSC or proven to be statistically consistent under it (collectively referred to here as MSC-based methods), to exclude all loci that are present in more than a single copy in any of the studied genomes. Furthermore, such analyses entail orthology assignment to avoid the potential of hidden paralogy in the data. The question we seek to answer in this study is: What happens if one runs such species tree inference methods on data where paralogy is present, in addition to or without ILS being present? Through simulation studies and analyses of two biological data sets, we show that running such methods on data with paralogs provide very accurate results, either by treating all gene copies within a family as alleles from multiple individuals or by randomly selecting one copy per species. Our results have significant implications for the use of MSC-based phylogenomic analyses, demonstrating that they do not have to be restricted to single-copy loci, thus greatly increasing the amount of data that can be used. [Multispecies coalescent; incomplete lineage sorting; gene duplication and loss; orthology; paralogy.]


Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Allman ◽  
Jonathan D. Mitchell ◽  
John A. Rhodes

AbstractA simple graphical device, the simplex plot of quartet concordance factors, is introduced to aid in the exploration of a collection of gene trees on a common set of taxa. A single plot summarizes all gene tree discord, and allows for visual comparison to the expected discord from the multispecies coalescent model (MSC) of incomplete lineage sorting on a species tree. A formal statistical procedure is described that can quantify the deviation from expectation for each subset of four taxa, suggesting when the data is not in accord with the MSC, and thus either gene tree inference error is substantial or a more complex model such as that on a network may be required. If the collection of gene trees appears to be in accord with the MSC, the plots may reveal when substantial incomplete lineage sorting is present and coalescent based species tree inference is preferred over concatenation approaches. Applications to both simulated and empirical multilocus data sets illustrate the insights provided.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
XiaoXu Pang ◽  
Da-Yong Zhang

The species studied in any evolutionary investigation generally constitute a very small proportion of all the species currently existing or that have gone extinct. It is therefore likely that introgression, which is widespread across the tree of life, involves "ghosts," i.e., unsampled, unknown, or extinct lineages. However, the impact of ghost introgression on estimations of species trees has been rarely studied and is thus poorly understood. In this study, we use mathematical analysis and simulations to examine the robustness of species tree methods based on a multispecies coalescent model under gene flow sourcing from an extant or ghost lineage. We found that very low levels of extant or ghost introgression can result in anomalous gene trees (AGTs) on three-taxon rooted trees if accompanied by strong incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). In contrast, even massive introgression, with more than half of the recipient genome descending from the donor lineage, may not necessarily lead to AGTs. In cases involving an ingroup lineage (defined as one that diverged no earlier than the most basal species under investigation) acting as the donor of introgression, the time of root divergence among the investigated species was either underestimated or remained unaffected, but for the cases of outgroup ghost lineages acting as donors, the divergence time was generally overestimated. Under many conditions of ingroup introgression, the stronger the ILS was, the higher was the accuracy of estimating the time of root divergence, although the topology of the species tree is more prone to be biased by the effect of introgression.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoit Morel ◽  
Paul Schade ◽  
Sarah Lutteropp ◽  
Tom A. Williams ◽  
Gergely J. Szöllösi ◽  
...  

Species tree inference from gene family trees is becoming increasingly popular because it can account for discordance between the species tree and the corresponding gene family trees. In particular, methods that can account for multiple-copy gene families exhibit potential to leverage paralogy as informative signal. At present, there does not exist any widely adopted inference method for this purpose. Here, we present SpeciesRax, the first maximum likelihood method that can infer a rooted species tree from a set of gene family trees and can account for gene duplication, loss, and transfer events. By explicitly modelling events by which gene trees can depart from the species tree, SpeciesRax leverages the phylogenetic rooting signal in gene trees. SpeciesRax infers species tree branch lengths in units of expected substitutions per site and branch support values via paralogy-aware quartets extracted from the gene family trees. Using both empirical and simulated datasets we show that SpeciesRax is at least as accurate as the best competing methods while being one order of magnitude faster on large datasets at the same time. We used SpeciesRax to infer a biologically plausible rooted phylogeny of the vertebrates comprising $188$ species from $31612$ gene families in one hour using $40$ cores. SpeciesRax is available under GNU GPL at https://github.com/BenoitMorel/GeneRax and on BioConda.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Smith ◽  
Nathanael Walker-Hale ◽  
Joseph F. Walker ◽  
Joseph W. Brown

AbstractStudies have demonstrated that pervasive gene tree conflict underlies several important phylogenetic relationships where different species tree methods produce conflicting results. Here, we present a means of dissecting the phylogenetic signal for alternative resolutions within a dataset in order to resolve recalcitrant relationships and, importantly, identify what the dataset is unable to resolve. These procedures extend upon methods for isolating conflict and concordance involving specific candidate relationships and can be used to identify systematic error and disambiguate sources of conflict among species tree inference methods. We demonstrate these on a large phylogenomic plant dataset. Our results support the placement of Amborella as sister to the remaining extant angiosperms, Gnetales as sister to pines, and the monophyly of extant gymnosperms. Several other contentious relationships, including the resolution of relationships within the bryophytes and the eudicots, remain uncertain given the low number of supporting gene trees. To address whether concatenation of filtered genes amplified phylogenetic signal for relationships, we implemented a combinatorial heuristic to test combinability of genes. We found that nested conflicts limited the ability of data filtering methods to fully ameliorate conflicting signal amongst gene trees. These analyses confirmed that the underlying conflicting signal does not support broad concatenation of genes. Our approach provides a means of dissecting a specific dataset to address deep phylogenetic relationships while also identifying the inferential boundaries of the dataset.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick F. McKenzie ◽  
Deren A. R. Eaton

AbstractA key distinction between species tree inference under the multi-species coalescent model (MSC), and the inference of gene trees in sliding windows along a genome, is in the effect of genetic linkage. Whereas the MSC explicitly assumes genealogies to be unlinked, i.e., statistically independent, genealogies located close together on genomes are spatially auto-correlated. Here we use tree sequence simulations with recombination to explore the effects of species tree parameters on spatial patterns of linkage among genealogies. We decompose coalescent time units to demonstrate differential effects of generation time and effective population size on spatial coalescent patterns, and we define a new metric, “phylogenetic linkage,” for measuring the rate of decay of phylogenetic similarity by comparison to distances among unlinked genealogies. Finally, we provide a simple example where accounting for phylogenetic linkage in sliding window analyses improves local gene tree inference.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Wascher ◽  
Laura Kubatko

AbtractNumerous methods for inferring species-level phylogenies under the coalescent model have been proposed within the last 20 years, and debates continue about the relative strengths and weaknesses of these methods. One desirable property of a phylogenetic estimator is that of statistical consistency, which means intuitively that as more data are collected, the probability that the estimated tree has the same topology as the true tree goes to 1. To date, consistency results for species tree inference under the multispecies coalescent have been derived only for summary statistics methods, such as ASTRAL and MP-EST. These methods have been found to be consistent given true gene trees, but may be inconsistent when gene trees are estimated from data for loci of finite length (Roch et al., 2019). Here we consider the question of statistical consistency for four taxa for SVDQuartets for general data types, as well as for the maximum likelihood (ML) method in the case in which the data are a collection of sites generated under the multispecies coalescent model such that the sites are conditionally independent given the species tree (we call these data Coalescent Independent Sites (CIS) data). We show that SVDQuartets is statistically consistent for all data types (i.e., for both CIS data and for multilocus data), and we derive its rate of convergence. We additionally show that ML is consistent for CIS data under the JC69 model, and discuss why a proof for the more general multilocus case is difficult. Finally, we compare the performance of maximum likelihood and SDVQuartets using simulation for both data types.


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