TY - JOUR
AU - Kalinowski, S T
AB - Bifurcating evolutionary trees are commonly used to describe genetic relationships between populations, but may not be appropriate for populations that did not evolve in a hierarchical manner. The degree to which bifurcating trees distort genetic relationships between populations can be quantified with R
2, the proportion the variation in a matrix of genetic distances between populations that is explained by a tree. Computer simulations were used to measure how well the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) and neighbor-joining (NJ) trees depicted population structure for three evolutionary models: a hierarchical model of population fragmentation, a linear stepping-stone model of gene flow and a two-dimensional stepping-stone model of gene flow. These simulations showed that the UPGMA did an excellent job of describing population structure when populations had a bifurcating history of fragmentation, but severely distorted genetic relationships for the linear and two-dimensional stepping-stone models. The NJ algorithm worked well in a broader range of evolutionary histories, including the linear stepping-stone model. A computer program for performing the calculations described in this study is available for download at 
www.montana.edu/kalinowski

.
TI - How well do evolutionary trees describe genetic relationships among populations?
JF - Heredity
DO - 10.1038/hdy.2008.136
DA - 2009-01-28
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/how-well-do-evolutionary-trees-describe-genetic-relationships-among-XEXiNHFPkD
SP - 506
EP - 513
VL - 102
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -