Super-tree Approach for Studying the Phylogeny of Prokaryotes: New Results on Completely Sequenced Genomes

摘要

In this paper we describe a super-tree approach that is able to use the information brought by hundreds of individual gene trees in order to establish a reliable phylogeny of prokaryotes. Indeed, it has been often shown that the use of single genes is not sufficient to solve such a complex case. This is mainly due to problems like reconstruction artifacts, existence of hidden paralogies or the presence of numerous lateral transfers. Here, our super-tree approach allowed us to build two trees containing 86 prokaryotic organisms. All the major bacterial and archeal taxonomic groups are monophyletic in these trees, which present some striking differences with the classical view of prokaryotic phylogeny represented by the ribosomal RNA trees.