The Impact of Taxon Sampling on Phylogenetic Inference: a Review of Two Decades of Controversy

Overview

Journal Brief Bioinform

Publisher Oxford University Press

Specialty Biology

Date 2011 Mar 26

PMID 21436145

Citations 65

Authors

Ahmed Ragab Nabhan

Indra Neil Sarkar

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been a long-standing debate about the impact of taxon sampling on phylogenetic inference. Studies have been based on both real and simulated data sets, within actual and theoretical contexts, and using different inference methods, to study the impact of taxon sampling. In some cases, conflicting conclusions have been drawn for the same data set. The main questions explored in studies to date have been about the effects of using sparse data, adding new taxa, including more characters from genome sequences and using different (or concatenated) locus regions. These questions can be reduced to more fundamental ones about the assessment of data quality and the design guidelines of taxon sampling in phylogenetic inference experiments. This review summarizes progress to date in understanding the impact of taxon sampling on the accuracy of phylogenetic analysis.

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