Fast supertree construction using quartet joining

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That all kinds of organisms that have ever lived are related through common ancestry and descent in one Tree of Life is one of the major insights of bological science. Knowledge of these phylogenetic relationships helps scientists to understand how the great diversity of life we see today has originated, provides a framework for inferring how living things have evolved, and allows testing hypotheses that seek to explain this diversity and identify the mechanisms that have generated it. Phylogenetic relationships can be inferred using morphology but are increasingly inferred from DNA or amino acid sequence data. However, the inferred phylogeny of a single gene may differ from (be incongruent with) the true species phylogeny, either due to errors in the inference or because the gene tree is not identical to the species tree. The latter can arise when, for example, genes are transferred horizontally between species, as has happened in the development of antibiotic resistance in some bacteria, or when genes are duplicated and subsequently lost. This raises questions of how best to do phylogenomics (the phylogenetic analysis of genomic scale data) with two alternative strategies currently being pursued (1) combining all genes into a single analysis and (2) building a supertree - a synthesis of the individual gene trees. Supertree methods can be considered a 'divide-and-conquer' approach where a large phylogenetic problem is decomposed into smaller problems which are then combined to give a global solution. Underpinning this is the expectation that individual gene trees can be more easily or effectively analysed because they are smaller and because they include only those taxa for which particular genes are available. This also assumes that the information in the individual trees can be combined efficiently, but unfortunately the supertree methods that are currently most relied upon in practice have a number of obviously undesirable properties, such as producing supertrees that contradict relationships that are true of every input tree (and which therefore must be true if any input tree is true). We propose to develop a new supertree method that uses logical inference to make species phylogenies from collections of gene trees, to implement it in software, and to test it with simulations and empirical data. In this method a supertree is grown by adding leaves; the inference about where to put new leaves is given by 'quartets', which can be considered the quanta of phylogenetic information, in the input trees. The new method is needed to enable researchers to make best use of the rapidly expanding number of complete genome sequences which may be of relevance to understanding the evolution of metabolic pathways, of drug resistance, to drug discovery, epidemiology, and diversification studies linked to historical climate change. Technical advances have seen the massive increases in the rate of production of new genomic data; complete genomes of prokaryotes can now be produced in an afternoon. Advances are now needed in the methods used to analyse this flood of data, and aim to replace ad hoc methods with better-founded alternatives. Based on its logical foundation, its flexibility, and on the speed of its computation, we expect that this will be a method of choice in phylogenomic analysis, but this needs to be confirmed through simulation to show its properties and determine its error rates, and through empirical tests that will provide proof of concept.