tRNA Signatures Reveal a Polyphyletic Origin of SAR11 Strains among Alphaproteobacteria
Figure 6
FastUniFrac-based phylogenetic tree of alphaproteobacteria using tRNA data computed according to the methods of [51].
The FastUniFrac algorithm was recently adapted as a phylogenomic method using tRNA genes. Like the supermatrix phylogenomic approach on tRNAs with results shown in Figures S3 and S4, this method uses unfiltered total sequence information of tRNAs. In contrast to Figure 5, both in this figure and in Figures S3 and S4, all SAR11 strains are affiliated with Rickettsiales. For reasons shown in Figure 7, we argue these results are artifacts of convergence in tRNA base contents. Complete source code and data to reproduce these results are in Dataset S5.