Question

In phylogenetic analysis, it is also important to test whether two competing tree topologies can be distinguished and whether one tree is significantly better than the other.

(a) True

(b) False

This question was posed to me in an interview for internship.

I need to ask this question from Phylogenetic Tree Evaluation topic in division Phylogenetic Tree Construction Methods and Programs of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right choice is (a) True

The explanation is: The task is different from bootstrapping in that it tests the statistical significance of the entire phylogeny, not just portions of it. For that purpose, several statistical tests have been developed specifically for each of the three types of tree reconstruction methods, distance, parsimony, and likelihood. A test devised specifically for MP trees is called the Kishino–Hasegawa (KH) test.