Abstract
AbstractWe introduce a widely applicable species delimitation method based on the multispecies coalescent model that is more efficient and more biologically realistic than existing methods. We extend a threshold-based method to allow the ancestral speciation rate to vary through time as a smooth piecewise function. Furthermore, we introduce the cutting-edge proposal kernels of StarBeast3 to this model, thus enabling rapid species delimitation on large molecular datasets and allowing the use of relaxed molecular clock models. We validate these methods with genomic sequence data and SNP data, and show they are more efficient than existing methods at achieving parameter convergence during Bayesian MCMC. Lastly, we apply these methods to two datasets (HemidactylusandGalagidae) and find inconsistencies with the published literature. Our methods are powerful for rapid quantitative testing of species boundaries in large multilocus datasets and are implemented as an open source BEAST 2 package called SPEEDEMON.
Funder
Marsden grant 18-UOA-096 from the Royal Society of New Zealand
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,Medicine (miscellaneous)