Question

During phylogenetic analysis, what is the purpose of using the bootstrapping method?

		To determine the best nucleotide substitution model.
		To assess the accuracy of the multiple sequence alignment.
		To calculate the probability of selecting an appropriate outgroup.
		To assess the accuracy of a particular tree topology.

Which of the following phylogenetic methods calculates posterior probabilities to identify the tree that has the maximum probability?

		Bayesian inference.
		Maximum likelihood.
		Maximum parsimony.
		Genetic distance inference.

Answer 1

Option B To assess the accuracy of the multiple sequence alignment. The bootstrap method is a resampling technique used to estimate statistics on a population by sampling a dataset with replacement. It can be used to estimate summary statistics such as the mean or standard deviation. During phylogenetic analysis the bootstrapping values indicates how many times out of 100, the same branch was observed when repeating the phylogenetic reconstruction on a re-sampled set of data. Option A Bayesian inference It is used to calculate posterior probabilities to identify the tree that has the maximum probability.