ABR: Experimental Phylogenies for Testing Phylogenetic Methods

小行星9508987 生物学家一直对生命的历史感兴趣，在过去的几十年里，生物学领域在重建这些历史方面取得了重大进展。现在有许多不同的方法可以用来重建历史，并且这些方法已经有了一些新的应用，例如发现美国汉坦病毒及其动物宿主，以及帮助确定卫生专业人员是否感染了艾滋病毒。在这个重要的科学领域中，一个固有的困难是通常没有办法真正了解所研究的生物体的历史，因此很难知道hmw，通常重建方法失败。在本研究中，我们将克服这一局限性。一种病毒将在实验室中生长，以产生具有已知祖先的谱系。DNA序列和其他特征将从所产生的谱系中获得。重建方法的成功将直接通过比较估计的历史与已知的历史进行测试。还将研究这些数据中可能阻碍恢复历史的不寻常属性，例如由共同选择压力导致的分子收敛的可能性。 %%% 这项研究将影响系统生物学领域，无论是在建立一个经验方法的实验系统发育建设和系统发育推断方法提供直接测试。 ***

9508987 Hillis Biologists have long been interested in the history of life, and the last few decades have been accompanied by major expansion in the areas of biology concerned with reconstructing these histories. There are now many different methods that can be used to reconstruct history, and there have been several new applications of the methods, such as discovering the US hantavirus and its animal reservoirs, as well as helping to determine whether health professionals infected their patients with HIV. An inherent difficulty in this important field of science is that there is usually no way to truly know the histories of the organisms being studied, hence it is difficult to know hmw often reconstruction methods fail. In the study proposed here, we will overcome that limitation. A virus will be grown in the laboratory to generate lineages with known ancestries. DNA sequences and other characteristics will be obtained from the resulting lineages. The success of reconstruction methods will be tested directly by comparing the estimated histories with the known histories. The data will also be studied for unusual properties that may thwart recovering history, such as the possibility of molecular convergence resulting from common selective pressures. %%% This study should impact the field of systematic biology both in establishing an empirical methodology for experimental phylogeny construction and in providing direct tests of phylogenetic inference methodology. ***