A 4-lineage statistical suite to evaluate the support of large-scale retrotransposon insertion data to reconstruct evolutionary trees

Abstract

AbstractRetrophylogenomics makes use of genome-wide retrotransposon presence/absence insertion patterns to resolve questions in phylogeny and population genetics. In the genomics era, evaluating high-throughput data requires the associated development of appropriately powerful statistical tools. The currently used KKSC 3-lineage statistical test for evaluating the significance of data is limited by the number of possible tree topologies it can assess in one step. To improve on this, we have now extended the analysis to simultaneously compare 4-lineages, which now enables us to evaluate ten distinct presence/absence insertion patterns for 26 possible tree topologies plus 129 trees with different incidences of hybridization. Moreover, the new tool includes statistics for multiple ancestral hybridizations, ancestral incomplete lineage sorting, bifurcation, and polytomy. The test is embedded in a user-friendly web R-application (http://retrogenomics.uni-muenster.de:3838/hammlet/) and is available for use by the general scientific community.