A Case Study using Mitochondrial Genomes of the Order Diprotodontia (Australasian Marsupials) Suggests that Single Ortholog is Not Sufficient for Phylogeny.

Citation: Wang, VCC, Kamarudin, NJ, Tan, XT, Ramesh, A, Chew, SSM, Murthy, MV, Yablochkin, NV, Mathivanan, K, Ling, MHT. 2020. A Case Study using Mitochondrial Genomes of the Order Diprotodontia (Australasian Marsupials) Suggests that Single Ortholog is Not Sufficient for Phylogeny. EC Clinical and Medical Case Reports 3(9): 93-114.

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All organisms exist today descended from a common ancestor and phylogenetic tree is a common means to analyze such evolutionary histories. Currently, orthologs are routinely used to construct phylogenetic trees. However, the number of orthologs required to determine the evolutionary history of a set of organisms is not clear. In this case study, we compare the generated phylogenetic trees from one ortholog against that of the complete set of orthologs using 13 mitochondrial genes of the 24 species from the Order Diprotodontia. Using the phylogenetic tree generated from the complete set of orthologs as benchmark, our results suggest that using single ortholog may result in distinctly different phylogenies as compared to benchmark and the average number of branch points from multiple single orthologs is significantly different (paired t-statistic = 8.01, p-value = 3.27e-14) from benchmark. This suggests that phylogenetic analysis from single ortholog or multiple single orthologs is not likely to reflect actual evolutionary history and the complete set of orthologs is required.