Sticky tips and misplaced roots: is there a bias in intraspecific phylogenetics? (Visiting Scholar)
Biologists infer the evolutionary trees connecting individuals, populations, and species by analyzing genetic and anatomical data. The methods we use to determine trees from raw data, while computationally advanced, are always forced to make simplifying assumptions about the details of complex evolutionary processes. False inferences about evolutionary history can result if our assumptions are too far from reality—and this is hard to check, because we don’t know the true evolutionary history for most groups of organisms. I am currently testing one important question about tree reconstruction: how we know where evolutionary trees are rooted. With trees at a low taxonomic level (often connecting individuals and populations rather than species), I think the roots of trees are sometimes being inferred incorrectly. I am investigating this with a combination of techniques, including simulating DNA sequence data on a known tree and then testing whether that tree can be inferred correctly from the simulated data.
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