Skip to main content
Log in

Analyzing the Fitch Method for Reconstructing Ancestral States on Ultrametric Phylogenetic Trees

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Bulletin of Mathematical Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The accuracy of the Fitch method for reconstructing ancestral states on ultrametric phylogenetic trees is studied. Two recurrence relations for computing the accuracy are given here. Using these relations, we analyze the convergence of the accuracy of the Fitch method for reconstructing the root state on a complete binary tree of 2n leaves as n goes to infinity, present a closed-form formula for the accuracy on ultrametric comb trees, and provide a lower bound on the accuracy on arbitrary ultrametric phylogenetic trees.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Baba, M.L., Goodman, M., Berger-Cohn, J., Demaille, J.G., Matsuda, G., 1984. The early adaptive evolution of calmodulin. Mol. Biol. Evol. 1, 442–455.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bleher, P.M., Ruiz, J., Zagrebnov, V.A., 1995. On the purity of the limiting Gibbs state for the Ising model on the Bethe lattice. J. Stat. Phys. 79, 473–482.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, W., Kenyon, C., Peres, Y., 2000. Broadcasting on trees and the Ising model. Ann. Appl. Probab. 10, 410–433.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, M., Thatte, B.D., 2009. Maximum parsimony on subsets of taxa. J. Theor. Biol. 260, 290–293.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fitch, W.M., 1971. Toward defining the course of evolution: Minimum change for a specific tree topology. Syst. Zool. 20, 406–416.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, G.L., Steel, M., Zhang, L.X., 2008. More taxa are not necessarily better for the reconstruction of ancestral character states. Syst. Biol. 57, 647–653.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, G.L., Ma, J., Zhang, L.X., 2009. Greedy selection of species for ancestral state reconstruction on phylogenies: Elimination is better than insertion. PLOS One, in press.

  • Liberles, D.A. (Ed.), 2007. Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Maddison, W.P., 1995. Calculating the probability distributions of ancestral states reconstructed by parsimony on phylogenetic trees. Syst. Biol. 44, 474–481.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mossel, E., 1998. Recursive reconstruction on periodic trees. Random Struct. Algorithms 16, 252–260.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pauling, L., Zuckerkandl, E., 1963. Chemical paleogenetics: molecular restoration studies of extinct forms of lives. Acta Chem. Scand. 17, S9–S16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pachter, L., 2007. An introduction to reconstructing ancestral genomes. In: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, AMS Short Course Subseries, vol. 64, pp. 1–20.

  • Salisbury, B.A., Kim, J., 2001. Ancestral state estimation and taxon sampling density. Syst. Biol. 50, 557–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steel, M., 1989. Distribution in bicoloured evolutionary trees. PhD thesis, Massey University, New Zealand.

  • Steel, M., Charleston, M., 1995. Five surprising properties of parsimoniously colored tree. Bull. Math. Biol. 57, 367–375.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Steel, M.A., Székely, L.A., 2007. Teasing apart two trees. Comb. Probab. Comput. 16, 903–922.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Thornton, J.W., 2004. Resurrecting ancient genes: Experimental analysis of extinct molecules. Nat. Rev. Genet. 5, 366–375.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, J., Nei, M., 1997. Accuracies of ancestral amino acid sequences inferred by parsimony, likelihood, and distance methods. J. Mol. Evol. 44, 139–146.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Louxin Zhang.

Additional information

Work of L. Zhang was supported by ARF(R146-000-109-112).

Work of J. Shen was partially supported by NSF (CNS 0835834) and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (ARP 003615-0039-200).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zhang, L., Shen, J., Yang, J. et al. Analyzing the Fitch Method for Reconstructing Ancestral States on Ultrametric Phylogenetic Trees. Bull. Math. Biol. 72, 1760–1782 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-010-9505-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-010-9505-8

Keywords

Navigation