Question

Sometimes a tree-building method may result in several equally optimal trees. A consensus tree can be built by showing the commonly resolved bifurcating portions and collapsing the ones that disagree among the trees, which results in a polytomy.

(a) True

(b) False

This question was posed to me during an interview.

I need to ask this question from Forms of Tree Representation in section Molecular Phylogenetics of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right answer is (a) True

Easiest explanation: Combining the nodes can be done either by strict consensus or by majority rule.

In a strict consensus tree, all conflicting nodes are collapsed into polytomies. In a consensus tree based on a majority rule, among the conflicting nodes, those that agree by more than 50% of the nodes are retained whereas the remaining nodes are collapsed into multifurcation.