Phylogenetic methods - Molecular phylogentics (Oct/26/2010 )

Can anyone tell me in plain english, what is the major difference between the neighbor-joining, minimum evolution and maximum likelihood methods?

Hi,

neighbor-joining is a clustering method used for the construction of trees. It is the common method.. Usually used for trees based on DNA or protein sequence data, the algorithm requires knowledge of the distance between each pair of taxa (e.g., species or sequences) in the tree.

minimum evolution depends on multiple hits at the same sites are used. In this case if a long DNA or amino acid sequence is used, the ME tree is preferable. When the number of nucleotides or amino acids used is relatively small, the NJ method generates the correct topology more often than does the ME method.


The method of maximum likelihood attempts to reconstruct a phylogeny using a model of evolution. this is computationally difficult to do and hence, the model of evolution must be a simple one. Even with simple models of evolutionary change the computational task is enormous and this is thus the slowest of all methods.

Hope this info will help you..

Have a nice work..

Regards
-MITHRA