Phylogeny Reconstruction in Primates under a New Mathematical model

This paper is the result of an interdisciplinary work between a biology and a computer science group. The former were interested in testing if it was possible to reconstruct a coherent phylogeny, by assuming that a speciic sequence was scattered in the genome of a certain representative biological group. The latter, who were studying and developing eecient approximation algorithms to reconstruct trees from sequences, were interested in understanding if it was possible to infer correct phylogeny relationship from real DNA, by using their algorithms. Then we proceeded using a particular DNA sequence as a primer in PCR ampliication and, by examining many species of Primates, we realized that it was possible to associate a peculiar electrophoretic banding pattern with each species. The phylogeny analysis was performed by giving those banding patterns in input to a phylogeny reconstruction algorithm we had speciically designed for binary patterns and which assumes a new model of parsimony tree. We have obtained a coherent phylogeny, recognizing inter-species and inter-genera variability, which proves the reliability of our assumption and increases the conndence of the algorithmical model used as a tool for phylogenetic analysis when this speciic genetic data are involved.

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