scholarly journals Speciation genes are more likely to have discordant gene trees

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Wang ◽  
Matthew W. Hahn

AbstractSpeciation genes are responsible for reproductive isolation between species. By directly participating in the process of speciation, the genealogies of isolating loci have been thought to more faithfully represent species trees. The unique properties of speciation genes may provide valuable evolutionary insights and help determine the true history of species divergence. Here, we formally analyze whether genealogies from loci participating in Dobzhansky-Muller (DM) incompatibilities are more likely to be concordant with the species tree under incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). Individual loci differ stochastically from the true history of divergence with a predictable frequency due to ILS, and these expectations—combined with the DM model of intrinsic reproductive isolation from epistatic interactions—can be used to examine the probability of concordance at isolating loci. Contrary to existing verbal models, we find that reproductively isolating loci that follow the DM model are often more likely to have discordant gene trees. These results are dependent on the pattern of isolation observed between three species, the time between speciation events, and the time since the last speciation event. Results supporting a higher probability of discordance are found for both derived-derived and derived-ancestral DM pairs, and regardless of whether incompatibilities are allowed or prohibited from segregating in the same population. Our overall results suggest that DM loci are unlikely to be especially useful for reconstructing species relationships, even in the presence of gene flow between incipient species, and may in fact be positively misleading.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Marin ◽  
Guillaume Achaz ◽  
Anton Crombach ◽  
Amaury Lambert

AbstractEvolutionary relationships between species are traditionally represented in the form of a tree, the species tree. Its reconstruction from molecular data is hindered by frequent conflicts between gene genealogies. Usually, these disagreements are explained by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) due to random coalescences of gene lineages inside the edges of the species tree. This paradigm, the multi-species coalescent (MSC), is constantly violated by the ubiquitous presence of gene flow, leading to incongruences between gene trees that cannot be explained by ILS alone. Here we argue instead in favor of a vision acknowledging the importance of gene flow and where gene histories shape the species tree rather than the opposite. We propose a new framework for modeling the joint evolution of gene and species lineages relaxing the hierarchy between the species tree and gene trees. We implement this framework in two mathematical models called the gene-based diversification models (GBD): 1) GBD-forward following all evolving genomes and 2) GBD-backward based on coalescent theory. They feature four parameters tuning colonization, gene flow, genetic drift and genetic differentiation. We propose a quick inference method based on differences between gene trees. Applied to two empirical data-sets prone to gene flow, we find a better support for the GBD model than for the MSC model. Along with the increasing awareness of the extent of gene flow, this work shows the importance of considering the richer signal contained in genomic histories, rather than in the mere species tree, to better apprehend the complex evolutionary history of species.


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.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Kandziora ◽  
Petr Sklenář ◽  
Filip Kolář ◽  
Roswitha Schmickl

A major challenge in phylogenetics and -genomics is to resolve young rapidly radiating groups. The fast succession of species increases the probability of incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), and different topologies of the gene trees are expected, leading to gene tree discordance, i.e., not all gene trees represent the species tree. Phylogenetic discordance is common in phylogenomic datasets, and apart from ILS, additional sources include hybridization, whole-genome duplication, and methodological artifacts. Despite a high degree of gene tree discordance, species trees are often well supported and the sources of discordance are not further addressed in phylogenomic studies, which can eventually lead to incorrect phylogenetic hypotheses, especially in rapidly radiating groups. We chose the high-Andean Asteraceae genus Loricaria to shed light on the potential sources of phylogenetic discordance and generated a phylogenetic hypothesis. By accounting for paralogy during gene tree inference, we generated a species tree based on hundreds of nuclear loci, using Hyb-Seq, and a plastome phylogeny obtained from off-target reads during target enrichment. We observed a high degree of gene tree discordance, which we found implausible at first sight, because the genus did not show evidence of hybridization in previous studies. We used various phylogenomic analyses (trees and networks) as well as the D-statistics to test for ILS and hybridization, which we developed into a workflow on how to tackle phylogenetic discordance in recent radiations. We found strong evidence for ILS and hybridization within the genus Loricaria. Low genetic differentiation was evident between species located in different Andean cordilleras, which could be indicative of substantial introgression between populations, promoted during Pleistocene glaciations, when alpine habitats shifted creating opportunities for secondary contact and hybridization.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sanderson ◽  
Michelle M. McMahon ◽  
Mike Steel

AbstractTerraces in phylogenetic tree space are sets of trees with identical optimality scores for a given data set, arising from missing data. These were first described for multilocus phylogenetic data sets in the context of maximum parsimony inference and maximum likelihood inference under certain model assumptions. Here we show how the mathematical properties that lead to terraces extend to gene tree - species tree problems in which the gene trees are incomplete. Inference of species trees from either sets of gene family trees subject to duplication and loss, or allele trees subject to incomplete lineage sorting, can exhibit terraces in their solution space. First, we show conditions that lead to a new kind of terrace, which stems from subtree operations that appear in reconciliation problems for incomplete trees. Then we characterize when terraces of both types can occur when the optimality criterion for tree search is based on duplication, loss or deep coalescence scores. Finally, we examine the impact of assumptions about the causes of losses: whether they are due to imperfect sampling or true evolutionary deletion.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ishrat Tanzila Farah ◽  
Md Muktadirul Islam ◽  
Kazi Tasnim Zinat ◽  
Atif Hasan Rahman ◽  
Md Shamsuzzoha Bayzid

AbstractSpecies tree estimation from multi-locus dataset is extremely challenging, especially in the presence of gene tree heterogeneity across the genome due to incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). Summary methods have been developed which estimate gene trees and then combine the gene trees to estimate a species tree by optimizing various optimization scores. In this study, we have formalized the concept of “phylogenomic terraces” in the species tree space, where multiple species trees with distinct topologies may have exactly the same optimization score (quartet score, extra lineage score, etc.) with respect to a collection of gene trees. We investigated the presence and implication of terraces in species tree estimation from multi-locus data by taking ILS into account. We analyzed two of the most popular ILS-aware optimization criteria: maximize quartet consistency (MQC) and minimize deep coalescence (MDC). Methods based on MQC are provably statistically consistent, whereas MDC is not a consistent criterion for species tree estimation. Our experiments, on a collection of dataset simulated under ILS, indicate that MDC-based methods may achieve competitive or identical quartet consistency score as MQC but could be significantly worse than MQC in terms of tree accuracy – demonstrating the presence and affect of phylogenomic terraces. This is the first known study that formalizes the concept of phylogenomic terraces in the context of species tree estimation from multi-locus data, and reports the presence and implications of terraces in species tree estimation under ILS.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dingqiao Wen ◽  
Luay Nakhleh

AbstractThe multispecies network coalescent (MSNC) is a stochastic process that captures how gene trees grow within the branches of a phylogenetic network. Coupling the MSNC with a stochastic mutational process that operates along the branches of the gene trees gives rise to a generative model of how multiple loci from within and across species evolve in the presence of both incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and reticulation (e.g., hybridization). We report on a Bayesian method for sampling the parameters of this generative model, including the species phylogeny, gene trees, divergence times, and population sizes, from DNA sequences of multiple independent loci. We demonstrate the utility of our method by analyzing simulated data and reanalyzing three biological data sets. Our results demonstrate the significance of not only co-estimating species phylogenies and gene trees, but also accounting for reticulation and ILS simultaneously. In particular, we show that when gene flow occurs, our method accurately estimates the evolutionary histories, coalescence times, and divergence times. Tree inference methods, on the other hand, underestimate divergence times and overestimate coalescence times when the evolutionary history is reticulate. While the MSNC corresponds to an abstract model of “intermixture,” we study the performance of the model and method on simulated data generated under a gene flow model. We show that the method accurately infers the most recent time at which gene flow occurs. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the new method to a 106-locus yeast data set. [Multispecies network coalescent; reticulation; incomplete lineage sorting; phylogenetic network; Bayesian inference; RJMCMC.]


Author(s):  
Leonardo S Miranda ◽  
Bernardo O Prestes ◽  
Alexandre Aleixo

Abstract Here we use an integrative approach, including coalescent-based methods, isolation–migration and species distribution models, to infer population structure, divergence times and diversification in the two species of the genus Cymbilaimus (Aves, Thamnophilidae). Our results support a recent and rapid diversification with both incomplete lineage sorting and gene flow shaping the evolutionary history of Cymbilaimus. The spatio-temporal pattern of cladogenesis suggests that Cymbilaimus originated in the north/western portion of cis-Andean South America and then diversified into the Brazilian Shield and Central America after consolidation of the modern Amazonian drainage and the Andean range. This evolutionary scenario is explained by cycles of range expansion and dispersal, followed by isolation, and recurrent gene flow, during the last 1.2 Myr. Our results agree with those recently reported for other closely related suboscine lineages, whereby the window of introgression between closely related taxa remains open for up to a few million years after their original split. In Cymbilaimus, introgression was recurrent between C. lineatus and C. sanctaemariae, even after they acquired vocal and ecological differentiation, supporting the claim that at least in Neotropical suboscines, full reproductive compatibility may take millions of years to evolve and cannot be interpreted as synonymous with a lack of speciation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Rezende Dias ◽  
Eduardo Guimarães Dupim ◽  
Thyago Vanderlinde ◽  
Beatriz Mello ◽  
Antonio Bernardo Carvalho

Abstract Background The Drosophilidae family is traditionally divided into two subfamilies: Drosophilinae and Steganinae. This division is based on morphological characters, and the two subfamilies have been treated as monophyletic in most of the literature, but some molecular phylogenies have suggested Steganinae to be paraphyletic. To test the paraphyletic-Steganinae hypothesis, here, we used genomic sequences of eight Drosophilidae (three Steganinae and five Drosophilinae) and two Ephydridae (outgroup) species and inferred the phylogeny for the group based on a dataset of 1,028 orthologous genes present in all species (> 1,000,000 bp). This dataset includes three genera that broke the monophyly of the subfamilies in previous works. To investigate possible biases introduced by small sample sizes and automatic gene annotation, we used the same methods to infer species trees from a set of 10 manually annotated genes that are commonly used in phylogenetics. Results Most of the 1,028 gene trees depicted Steganinae as paraphyletic with distinct topologies, but the most common topology depicted it as monophyletic (43.7% of the gene trees). Despite the high levels of gene tree heterogeneity observed, species tree inference in ASTRAL, in PhyloNet, and with the concatenation approach strongly supported the monophyly of both subfamilies for the 1,028-gene dataset. However, when using the concatenation approach to infer a species tree from the smaller set of 10 genes, we recovered Steganinae as a paraphyletic group. The pattern of gene tree heterogeneity was asymmetrical and thus could not be explained solely by incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). Conclusions Steganinae was clearly a monophyletic group in the dataset that we analyzed. In addition to ILS, gene tree discordance was possibly the result of introgression, suggesting complex branching processes during the early evolution of Drosophilidae with short speciation intervals and gene flow. Our study highlights the importance of genomic data in elucidating contentious phylogenetic relationships and suggests that phylogenetic inference for drosophilids based on small molecular datasets should be performed cautiously. Finally, we suggest an approach for the correction and cleaning of BUSCO-derived genomic datasets that will be useful to other researchers planning to use this tool for phylogenomic studies.


Author(s):  
Paul Zaharias ◽  
Tandy Warnow

With the increased availability of sequence data and even of fully sequenced and assembled genomes, phylogeny estimation of very large trees (even of hundreds of thousands of sequences) is now a goal for some biologists. Yet, the construction of these phylogenies is a complex pipeline presenting analytical and computational challenges, especially when the number of sequences is very large. In the last few years, new methods have been developed that aim to enable highly accurate phylogeny estimations on these large datasets, including divide-and-conquer techniques for multiple sequence alignment and/or tree estimation, methods that can estimate species trees from multi-locus datasets while addressing heterogeneity due to biological processes (e.g., incomplete lineage sorting and gene duplication and loss), and methods to add sequences into large gene trees or species trees. Here we present some of these recent advances and discuss opportunities for future improvements.


Author(s):  
Maddie E. James ◽  
Henry Arenas-Castro ◽  
Jeffery S. Groh ◽  
Jan Engelstädter ◽  
Daniel Ortiz-Barrientos

AbstractParallel evolution of ecotypes occurs when selection independently drives the evolution of similar traits across similar environments. The multiple origin of ecotypes is often inferred on the basis of a phylogeny which clusters populations according to geographic location and not by the environment they occupy. However, the use of phylogenies to infer parallel evolution in closely related populations is problematic due to the potential for gene flow and incomplete lineage sorting to uncouple the genetic structure at neutral markers from the colonization history of populations. Here, we demonstrate multiple origins within ecotypes of an Australian wildflower, Senecio lautus. We observed strong genetic structure as well as phylogenetic clustering by geography, and show this is unlikely due to gene flow between parapatric ecotypes, which is surprisingly low. We further confirm this analytically by demonstrating that phylogenetic distortion due to gene flow often requires higher levels of migration than those observed in S. lautus. Our results imply that selection can repeatedly create similar phenotypes despite the perceived homogenizing effects of gene flow.


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