Genes and Other Samples of DNA Sequence Data for Phylogenetic Inference

A series of computational experiments were conducted using complete mitochondrial genomes from 10 vertebrate species to gain a better understanding of the sampling properties of DNA sequence data in phylogenetic analysis. The complete DNA sequences from the mitochondrial genomes of cow, carp, chicken, human, loach, mouse, rat, harbor seal, fin whale and frog were aligned gene by gene and assembled into a data set of 16,075 sites which formed the basis of phylogenetic analyses. Results suggest that individual gene sequences are not sufficient samples from which to infer the phylogeny of the taxa.