Title
Tree and rate estimation by local evaluation of heterochronous nucleotide data.
Abstract
Heterochronous gene sequence data is important for characterizing the evolutionary processes of fast-evolving organisms such as RNA viruses. A limited set of algorithms exists for estimating the rate of nucleotide substitution and inferring phylogenetic trees from such data. The authors here present a new method, Tree and Rate Estimation by Local Evaluation (TREBLE) that robustly calculates the rate of nucleotide substitution and phylogeny with several orders of magnitude improvement in computational time.For the basis of its rate estimation TREBLE novelly utilizes a geometric interpretation of the molecular clock assumption to deduce a local estimate of the rate of nucleotide substitution for triplets of dated sequences. Averaging the triplet estimates via a variance weighting yields a global estimate of the rate. From this value, an iterative refinement procedure relying on statistical properties of the triplets then generates a final estimate of the global rate of nucleotide substitution. The estimated global rate is then utilized to find the tree from the pairwise distance matrix via an UPGMA-like algorithm.Simulation studies show that TREBLE estimates the rate of nucleotide substitution with point estimates comparable with the best of available methods. Confidence intervals are comparable with that of BEAST. TREBLE's phylogenetic reconstruction is significantly improved over the other distance matrix method but not as accurate as the Bayesian algorithm. Compared with three other algorithms, TREBLE reduces computational time by a minimum factor of 3000. Relative to the algorithm with the most accurate estimates for the rate of nucleotide substitution (i.e. BEAST), TREBLE is over 10,000 times more computationally efficient.jdobrien.bol.ucla.edu/TREBLE.html
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1093/bioinformatics/btl577
Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
computational time,global estimate,accurate estimate,local evaluation,nucleotide substitution,final estimate,bayesian algorithm,heterochronous nucleotide data,upgma-like algorithm,estimated global rate,rate estimation treble novelly,global rate,molecular clock,confidence interval,distance matrix,nucleotides,point estimation,limit set,phylogenetic tree
Point estimation,Iterative refinement,Pairwise comparison,Weighting,Phylogenetic tree,Distance matrix,Bioinformatics,Confidence interval,Statistics,Molecular clock,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
2
1367-4811
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.56
4
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhu Yang130.56
John D O'Brien230.56
Xiaobin Zheng3452.83
Huaiqiu Zhu416215.27
Zhen-Su She51259.43