RERconverge Expansion: Using Relative Evolutionary Rates to Study Complex Categorical Trait Evolution.

ABSTRACT: Comparative genomics approaches seek to associate molecular evolution with the evolution of phenotypes across a phylogeny. Many of these methods lack the ability to analyze non-ordinal categorical traits with more than two categories. To address this limitation, we introduce an expansion to RERconverge that associates shifts in evolutionary rates with the convergent evolution of categorical traits. The categorical RERconverge expansion includes methods for performing categorical ancestral state reconstruction, statistical tests for associating relative evolutionary rates with categorical variables, and a new method for performing phylogeny-aware permutations, "permulations", on categorical traits. We demonstrate our new method on a three-category diet phenotype, and we compare its performa

SUBMITTER: Redlich R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11529301 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature