Special Care Is Needed in Applying Phylogenetic Comparative Methods to Gene Trees with Speciation and Duplication Nodes.

ABSTRACT: How gene function evolves is a central question of evolutionary biology. It can be investigated by comparing functional genomics results between species and between genes. Most comparative studies of functional genomics have used pairwise comparisons. Yet it has been shown that this can provide biased results, as genes, like species, are phylogenetically related. Phylogenetic comparative methods should be used to correct for this, but they depend on strong assumptions, including unbiased tree estimates relative to the hypothesis being tested. Such methods have recently been used to test the "ortholog conjecture," the hypothesis that functional evolution is faster in paralogs than in orthologs. Although pairwise comparisons of tissue specificity (τ) provided support for the ortholog conject

SUBMITTER: Begum T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8042747 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature