PhyPA: Phylogenetic method with pairwise sequence alignment outperforms likelihood methods in phylogenetics involving highly diverged sequences

What is it about?

Phylogenetics become difficult with highly divergent sequences because of difficulty in reconstructing a good multiple sequence alignment. This new tool builds trees based on pairwise alignments and simultaneously estimated distances. Benchmarking suggests that it is as good as maximum likelihood methods for highly divergent sequences (not as good as ML for sequences with low divergence).

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Why is it important?

While pairwise sequence alignment (PSA) by dynamic programming is guaranteed to generate one of the optimal alignments, multiple sequence alignment (MSA) of highly divergent sequences often results in poorly aligned sequences, plaguing all subsequent phylogenetic analysis. One way to avoid this problem is to use only PSA to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, which can only be done with distance-based methods. I compared the accuracy of this new computational approach (named PhyPA for phylogenetics by pairwise alignment) against the maximum likelihood method using MSA (the ML+MSA approach), based on nucleotide, amino acid and codon sequences simulated with different topologies and tree lengths. I present a surprising discovery that the fast PhyPA method consistently outperforms the slow ML+MSA approach for highly diverged sequences even when all optimization options were turned on for the ML+MSA approach. Only when sequences are not highly diverged (i.e., when a reliable MSA can be obtained) does the ML+MSA approach outperforms PhyPA. The true topologies are always recovered by ML with the true alignment from the simulation. However, with MSA derived from alignment programs such as MAFFT or MUSCLE, the recovered topology consistently has higher likelihood than that for the true topology. Thus, the failure to recover the true topology by the ML+MSA is not because of insufficient search of tree space, but by the distortion of phylogenetic signal by MSA methods. I have implemented in DAMBE PhyPA and two approaches making use of multi-gene data sets to derive phylogenetic support for subtrees equivalent to resampling techniques such as bootstrapping and jackknifing.