A new mathematical approach to measure the reliability of phylogenetic trees in the big data era

A publication in Nature by the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, in association with researchers from South Africa, proposes a new phylogenetic bootstrap method. The paper was inspired by one of the most cited publications in the history of science (more than 35,000 citations), written by Joseph Felsenstein in 1985. Felsenstein described the first phylogenetic bootstrap technique, which for more than 30 years has proven to be extremely useful and relevant in a huge number of fields. With the emergence of big data in biology and high-throughput sequencing, however, the limitations of Felsenstein's method have become apparent, as it is often unable to reveal the signals contained in large datasets. The method proposed by Olivier Gascuel's team addresses this weakness. The article in Nature demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed method for large alignments of sequences from mammals and HIV and for simulated datasets.

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