- Communication -

Volume 7

Full article

Deep metazoan phylogeny

Daniel Gerlach^1,2, Matthias Wolf¹*, Thomas Dandekar¹, Tobias Müller¹, Andreas Pokorny¹ and Sven Rahmann³

¹ Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, D-97074 Würzburg, Germany
² Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School, 1 rue Michel-Servet, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
³ Junior research group Computational Methods for Emerging Technologies (COMET); Genome Informatics, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, D-33594 Bielefeld, Germany


* Corresponding author
  Email: matthias.wolf@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de


Edited by E. Wingender; received November 11, 2006; revised February 14, 2007; accepted February 18, 2007; published February 24, 2007

Abstract

We reconstructed a robust phylogenetic tree of the Metazoa, consisting of almost 1,500 taxa, by profile neighbor joining (PNJ), an automated computational method that inherits the efficiency of the neighbor joining algorithm. This tree supports the one proposed in the latest review on metazoan phylogeny. Our main goal is not to discuss aspects of the phylogeny itself, but rather to point out that PNJ can be a valuable tool when the basal branching pattern of a large phylogenetic tree must be estimated, whereas traditional methods would be computationally impractical.

Keywords: 18S rRNA, animals, Articulata, bootstrap, Coelomata, Deuterostomia, Ecdysozoa, large tree, Lophotrochozoa, Metazoa, phylogenetics, phylogeny, Platyzoa, PNJ, probabilistic sequence profile, ProfDist, profile neighbor-joining, supertree method, systematics