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Biological characters can be employed for both taxonomy and phylogenetics, but is conscripting characters for double duty a good idea? We explore the evolution of characters designed for taxonomic diagnosis in Costa Rican heterospiline wasps, a hyperdiverse lineage of parasitoid Braconidae, by mapping them to a robust multi-locus molecular phylogeny. We discover a strong positive relationship b...

The presence of morphologically identical individuals that are genetically divergent, known as cryptic species, is a phenomenon that is likely to be of importance at the theoretical level, for speciation studies, and at the applied level, for management purposes. Cryptic species are probably common in the marine environment, and they have been described in a variety of habitats. Here we present...

Tuffley and Steel (Bull. Math. Biol. 59:581-607, 1997) proved that maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony methods in phylogenetics are equivalent for sequences of characters under a simple symmetric model of substitution with no common mechanism. This result has been widely cited ever since. We show that small changes to the model assumptions suffice to make the two methods inequivalent. In p...

Many empirical studies have revealed considerable differences between nonparametric bootstrapping and Bayesian posterior probabilities in terms of the support values for branches, despite claimed predictions about their approximate equivalence. We investigated this problem by simulating data, which were then analyzed by maximum likelihood bootstrapping and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using i...

As larger, more complex data sets are being used to infer phylogenies, accuracy of these phylogenies increasingly requires models of evolution that accommodate heterogeneity in the processes of molecular evolution. We investigated the effect of improper data partitioning on phylogenetic accuracy, as well as the type I error rate and sensitivity of Bayes factors, a commonly used method for choos...

Bayesian inference is becoming a common statistical approach to phylogenetic estimation because, among other reasons, it allows for rapid analysis of large data sets with complex evolutionary models. Conveniently, Bayesian phylogenetic methods use currently available stochastic models of sequence evolution. However, as with other model-based approaches, the results of Bayesian inference are con...

background and aims: avian influenza (ai) h9n2 subtype was first reported to infect turkeys in the united states in 1966 and has been panzootic in europe and asia. the impact of avian influenza caused by h9n2 viruses in iran is now significantly more severe than in previous years. methods: sequence analysis and phylogenetic study of the complete coding region polymerase a (pa) gene of h9n2 subt...

NO abstract this article: Phylogenetic Analysis of Human Astrovirus Infection among Children Suffering from Gastroenteritis Referred to Aboozar Hospital, Ahvaz, Iran

Members of Nemacheilidae Family, Turcinoemacheilus genus were subjected to molecular phylogenetic analysis in this study. This genus was reported in 2009 to inhabit in Karoon River drainage, in contrary to previous assumption that it was the endemic species in the Basin of Tigris River. It was sampled from three stations placed in different tributaries in Karoon drainage and evaluated to unders...