Taenia Biomolecular Phylogeny and the Impact of Mitochondrial Genes on this Latter

Abstract

Variations in mitochondrial genes are usually considered to infer phylogenies. However some of these genes are lesser constraint than other ones, and thus may blur the phylogenetic signals shared by the majority of the mitochondrial DNA sequences. To investigate such effects, in this research work, the molecular phylogeny of the genus Taenia is studied using 14 coding sequences extracted from mitochondrial genomes of 17 species. We constructed 16,384 trees, using a combination of 1 up to 14 genes. We obtained 131 topologies, and we showed that only four particular instances were relevant. Using further statistical investigations, we then extracted a particular topology, which displays more robustness properties.