Question

Which of the following is untrue regarding the distance methods?

(a) The sequence pairs that have the largest number of sequence changes between them are termed ‘neighbors’

(b) On a tree, these sequences share a node or common ancestor position and are each joined to that node by a branch

(c) It produces a phylogenetic tree of the group

(d) It employs the number of changes between each pair in a group of sequences

This question was posed to me by my school teacher while I was bunking the class.

My doubt is from Maximum Parsimony Method in chapter Phylogenetic Tree Construction Methods and Programs of Bioinformatics

Answer 1

Right option is (a) The sequence pairs that have the largest number of sequence changes between them are termed ‘neighbors’

The best explanation: The goal of distance methods is to identify a tree that positions the neighbors correctly and that also has branch lengths which reproduce the original data as closely as possible. Finding the closest neighbors among a group of sequences by the distance method is often the first step in producing a multiple sequence alignment.