Choosing the Best Genes for the Job: The Case for Stationary Genes in Genome-Scale Phylogenetics

Abstract
The advent of genomics has fueled optimism for improvement in the reliability and accuracy of phylogenetic trees. An implicit assumption is that there will be an inexorable improvement in phylogenetic accuracy as the number of genes used increases, and that this approach is necessary because there are no identifiable parameters that predict the phylogenetic performance of genes (Gee, 2003; Rokas et al. 2003). These issues were explored in the recent article by Rokas et al. who investigated the phylogenetic signal in a sample of 106 protein-encoding genes selected from the genomes of 8 species of yeast.