Title
Rebooting the human mitochondrial phylogeny: an automated and scalable methodology with expert knowledge.
Abstract
Mitochondrial DNA is an ideal source of information to conduct evolutionary and phylogenetic studies due to its extraordinary properties and abundance. Many insights can be gained from these, including but not limited to screening genetic variation to identify potentially deleterious mutations. However, such advances require efficient solutions to very difficult computational problems, a need that is hampered by the very plenty of data that confers strength to the analysis.We develop a systematic, automated methodology to overcome these difficulties, building from readily available, public sequence databases to high-quality alignments and phylogenetic trees. Within each stage in an autonomous workflow, outputs are carefully evaluated and outlier detection rules defined to integrate expert knowledge and automated curation, hence avoiding the manual bottleneck found in past approaches to the problem. Using these techniques, we have performed exhaustive updates to the human mitochondrial phylogeny, illustrating the power and computational scalability of our approach, and we have conducted some initial analyses on the resulting phylogenies.The problem at hand demands careful definition of inputs and adequate algorithmic treatment for its solutions to be realistic and useful. It is possible to define formal rules to address the former requirement by refining inputs directly and through their combination as outputs, and the latter are also of help to ascertain the performance of chosen algorithms. Rules can exploit known or inferred properties of datasets to simplify inputs through partitioning, therefore cutting computational costs and affording work on rapidly growing, otherwise intractable datasets. Although expert guidance may be necessary to assist the learning process, low-risk results can be fully automated and have proved themselves convenient and valuable.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1186/1471-2105-12-174
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
algorithms,microarrays,outlier detection,mitochondria,mitochondrial dna,phylogeny,bioinformatics,sequence alignment,phylogenetic tree,genetic variation
Computational problem,Phylogenetic tree,Biology,Human Genome Diversity Project,Mitochondrial DNA,Bioinformatics,Phylogenetics,Genetics,DNA microarray,Perfect phylogeny,Scalability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.63
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roberto Blanco1404.02
Elvira Mayordomo250039.46
Julio Montoya3151.14
Eduardo Ruiz-Pesini4404.31