Question

Which of the following is incorrect statement about Character-based methods?

(a) They are also called discrete methods

(b) They are based directly on the sequence characters rather than on pairwise distances

(c) They doesn’t count mutational events accumulated on the sequences

(d) They may avoid the loss of information when characters are converted to distances

The question was posed to me in an interview.

My query is from Character Based Methods in section Phylogenetic Tree Construction Methods and Programs of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

The correct choice is (c) They doesn’t count mutational events accumulated on the sequences

Easy explanation: They count mutational events accumulated on the sequences. This preservation of character information means that evolutionary dynamics of each character can be studied. Ancestral sequences can also be inferred. The two most popular character-based approaches are the maximum parsimony (MP) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods.