Time Clustered Sampling Can Inflate the Inferred Substitution Rate in Foot-And-Mouth Disease Virus Analyses.

ABSTRACT: With the emergence of analytical software for the inference of viral evolution, a number of studies have focused on estimating important parameters such as the substitution rate and the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) for rapidly evolving viruses. Coupled with an increasing abundance of sequence data sampled under widely different schemes, an effort to keep results consistent and comparable is needed. This study emphasizes commonly disregarded problems in the inference of evolutionary rates in viral sequence data when sampling is unevenly distributed on a temporal scale through a study of the foot-and-mouth (FMD) disease virus serotypes SAT 1 and SAT 2. Our study shows that clustered temporal sampling in phylogenetic analyses of FMD viruses will strongly bias the inferences

SUBMITTER: Pedersen CE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4667911 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature