Abstract
Cyanobacteria are known to play important roles in driving biological and geochemical innovations in ancient Earth. The origin of Cyanobacteria is the key to understanding these evolutionary events and thus has gained much interest to biologists and geobiologists. Recent development of the molecular dating approaches provides us an opportunity to assess the timeline of Cyanobacteria evolution based on relaxed clock models. The implementation of Bayesian phylogenetic approaches accommodates the uncertainties from different sources, such as fossil calibrations and topological structure of the phylogenomic tree, and provides us converged estimates of posterior mean ages. In this chapter, by taking Cyanobacteria as an example, we introduce a refined strategy to perform molecular dating analysis, as well as a practical method to evaluate the precision of dating analysis.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou) (SMSEGL20SC02) and Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund (14110820).
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The custom scripts as well as the genome set of Cyanobacteria are available in the online GitHub repository (https://github.com/luolab-cuhk/MMB_Cyano_dating).
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Zhang, H., Wang, S., Luo, H. (2022). A Computational Protocol for Dating the Evolution of Cyanobacteria. In: Luo, H. (eds) Environmental Microbial Evolution. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2569. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2691-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2691-7_2
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