Once known some biological characteristics of six Trypanosoma cruzi strains, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis was made. Cluster analysis by UPGMA (unweighted pair group method analysis) was then applied both to biological parameters and RAPD profiles. Inspection of the UPGMA phenograms indicates identical clusters, so supporting that usefulness of biological parameters to char...

UPGMA (Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean) is a widely used clustering method. Here we show that UPGMA is a greedy heuristic for the normalized equidistant minimum evolution (NEME) problem, that is, finding a rooted tree that minimizes the minimum evolution score relative to the dissimilarity matrix among all rooted trees with the same leaf-set in which all leaves have the same d...

We will use a variation of UPGMA in UPGMA we have a distance matrix, in each iteration we take the pair i, j with the minimal distance: ∀k, l : di,j < dk,l and create a new node which is their parent.In the UPGMA algorithm the new distances for this node is the average of the two distances of it’s children : ∀l : Di+j,l = 12 (di,l + dj,l). We will talk about a very similar idea for clustering g...

Reconstruction of phylogeny of a protein family from a sequence alignment can produce results of different quality. Our goal is to predict the quality of phylogeny reconstruction basing on features that can be extracted from the input alignment. We used Fitch-Margoliash (FM) method of phylogeny reconstruction and random forest as a predictor. For training and testing the predictor, alignments o...

Bermudagrass [Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.], an important turfgrass used in public parks, home lawns, golf courses and sports fields, is widely distributed in China. In the present study, sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) markers were used to assess genetic diversity and population structure among 157 indigenous bermudagrass genotypes from 20 provinces in China. The application of 2...

The genetic diversity study has paramount importance in breeding programs; hence, it allows selection and choice of the parental genetic divergence, which have the agronomic traits desired by the breeder. This study aimed to characterize the genetic divergence between 24 soybean genotypes through their agronomic traits, using multivariate clustering methods to select the potential genitors for ...

In examining genetic data in recent publications, Backeljau et al. showed cases in which two or more different trees (tie trees) were constructed from a single data set for the neighbor-joining (NJ) method and the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). However, it is still unclear how often and under what conditions tie trees are generated. Therefore, I examined these proble...

The relative merits of four different tree-making methods in obtaining the correct topology were studied by using computer simulation. The methods studied were the unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA), Fitch and Margoliash's (FM) method, thd distance Wagner (DW) method, and Tateno et al.'s modified Farris (MF) method. An ancestral DNA sequence was assumed to evolve into eig...