Phylogenetic analysis of large molecular data sets
Technological advances in molecular biology have greatly increased the speed and efficiency of DNA sequencing, making it possible to construct large molecular data sets for phylogeny reconstruction relatively quickly. Despite their potential for improving our understanding of phylogeny, these large data sets also provide many challenges. In this paper, we discuss several of these challenges, including 1) the failure of a search to find the most parsimonious trees (the local optimum) in a reasonable amount of time, 2) the difference between a local optimum and the global optimum, and 3) the existence of multiple classes (islands) of most parsimonious trees. We also discuss possible strategies to improve the' likelihood of finding the most parsimonious tree(s) and present two examples from our work on angiosperm phylogeny. We conclude with a discussion of two alternatives to analyses of entire large data sets, the exemplar approach and compartmentalization, and suggest that additional consideration must be given to issues of data analysis for large data sets, whether morphological or molecular.