Figures
Retroposon Insertion Statistics
Ancient retroposon insertions can be used as virtually homoplasy-free markers to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of species. Inherited, orthologous insertions in related species offer reliable signals of a common origin of the given species. One prerequisite for such a phylogenetically informative insertion is that the inserted element was fixed in the ancestral population before speciation; if not, polymorphically inserted elements may lead to random distributions of presence/absence states during speciation and possibly to apparently conflicting reconstructions of their ancestry. Churakov et al.
Image Credit: Churakov et al.
Citation: (2016) PLoS Computational Biology Issue Image | Vol. 12(3) March 2016. PLoS Comput Biol 12(3): ev12.i03. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pcbi.v12.i03
Published: March 31, 2016
Copyright: © 2016 Churakov et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Ancient retroposon insertions can be used as virtually homoplasy-free markers to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of species. Inherited, orthologous insertions in related species offer reliable signals of a common origin of the given species. One prerequisite for such a phylogenetically informative insertion is that the inserted element was fixed in the ancestral population before speciation; if not, polymorphically inserted elements may lead to random distributions of presence/absence states during speciation and possibly to apparently conflicting reconstructions of their ancestry. Churakov et al.
Image Credit: Churakov et al.