The efficiency of entropy evolution rate for construction of phylogenetic trees

Abstract

The entropy evolution rate introduced by Ohya (Ohya, 1989) is one of the measures to classify gene sequences such as DNA sequences or amino acid sequences and to construct phylogenetic trees. The efficiency of this measure for the construction of phylogenetic trees with DNA sequences is examined in this paper. Taking model trees with branches of given evolutionary rates, we generated sequences with 1000 nucleotides along the branches of each model. Computer simulation was performed 100 times for each model. The entropy evolution rate was found to give the correct toplogy of tree more often than other methods when the evolutionary rate of a lineage (branch) was higher than 0.5 par site.