Testing the impact of morphological rate heterogeneity on ancestral state reconstruction of five floral traits in angiosperms.

ABSTRACT: Ancestral state reconstruction is an important tool to study morphological evolution and often involves estimating transition rates among character states. However, various factors, including taxonomic scale and sampling density, may impact transition rate estimation and indirectly also the probability of the state at a given node. Here, we test the influence of rate heterogeneity using maximum likelihood methods on five binary perianth characters, optimized on a phylogenetic tree of angiosperms including 1230 species sampled from all families. We compare the states reconstructed by an equal-rate (Mk1) and a two-rate model (Mk2) fitted either with a single set of rates for the whole tree or as a partitioned model, allowing for different rates on five partitions of the tree. We find strong

SUBMITTER: Reyes E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6013437 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature