Commentary
Difficult phylogenetic questions: more data, maybe; better methods, certainly
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* Corresponding author: Hervé Philippe herve.philippe@umontreal.ca
Département de Biochimie, Centre Robert-Cedergren, Université de Montréal, Succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7, Canada
BMC Biology 2011, 9:91 doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-91
Published: 29 December 2011Abstract
Contradicting the prejudice that endosymbiosis is a rare phenomenon, Husník and co-workers show in BMC Biology that bacterial endosymbiosis has occured several times independently during insect evolution. Rigorous phylogenetic analyses, in particular using complex models of sequence evolution and an original site removal procedure, allow this conclusion to be established after eschewing inference artefacts that usually plague the positioning of highly divergent endosymbiont genomic sequences.
See research article http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/9/87 webcite