Question

The tree construction process is somewhat similar to that used UPGMA.

(a) True

(b) False

This question was addressed to me during an online interview.

Question is from Distance Based Methods in division Phylogenetic Tree Construction Methods and Programs of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Correct answer is (b) False

The explanation is: Rather than building trees from the closest pair of branches and progressing to the entire tree, the NJ tree method begins with a completely unresolved star tree by joining all taxa onto a single node and progressively decomposes the tree by selecting pairs of taxa based on the above modified pairwise distances. This allows the taxa with the shortest corrected distances to be joined first as a node.