A critical appraisal of the use of microRNA data in phylogenetics.

ABSTRACT: Recent progress in resolving the tree of life continues to expose relationships that resist resolution, which drives the search for novel sources of information to solve these difficult phylogenetic problems. A recent example, the presence and absence of microRNA families, has been vigorously promoted as an ideal source of phylogenetic data and has been applied to several perennial phylogenetic problems. The utility of such data for phylogenetic inference hinges critically both on developing stochastic models that provide a reasonable description of the process that give rise to these data, and also on the careful validation of those models in real inference scenarios. Remarkably, however, the statistical behavior and phylogenetic utility of microRNA data have not yet been rigorously chara

SUBMITTER: Thomson RC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4156711 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature