On the Impossibility of Reconstructing Ancestral Data and Phylogenies
- 1 October 2003
- journal article
- Published by Mary Ann Liebert Inc in Journal of Computational Biology
- Vol. 10 (5) , 669-676
- https://doi.org/10.1089/106652703322539015
Abstract
We prove that it is impossible to reconstruct ancestral data at the root of "deep" phylogenetic trees with high mutation rates. Moreover, we prove that it is impossible to reconstruct the topology of "deep" trees with high mutation rates from a number of characters smaller than a low-degree polynomial in the number of leaves. Our impossibility results hold for all reconstruction methods. The proofs apply tools from information theory and percolation theory.Keywords
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