What is the reason for the low bootstrap value of the phylogenetic tree I constructed?

Rachel Rival
Rachel Rival
Jul 18, 2022

I used known sequences to find strains with similarity above 97% in NCBI to construct phylogenetic trees. ALIGN all sequences with CLUSTAL W after reorienting them. After comparing all the sequences, the beginning and end of the sequence are deleted. However, when drawing trees with MEG Read more Read less more less

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Luke goodenough Answered Jul 19, 2022

University of North Carolina

Hello! First of all, it's probably because the sequences are highly homologous. It's not always better to have more homology when you're building phylogenetic relationships, the data set you choose depends on how different your molecular data are. Tree construction is essentially a kind of clustering analysis, which gathers the ones with high similarity and arranges the near and far relationships with the ones with low similarity according to the degree of difference. Mega software defines branches as binary. That is, no matter how similar the sequence is, it will default to the binary scale. The result is that if the sequence differences are just right, the tree will be fine, and if the sequence differences are not right, the tree will be very wrong. In addition, the Bootstrap method is not equal to the level of sequence homology. If the level of homology is not high, the Bootstrap value may also be high, without the necessary correlation between the two. Wish you all the best!

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