February 2019 archive

An updated phylogeny of the <em>Alphaproteobacteria</em> reveals that the parasitic <em>Rickettsiales</em> and <em>Holosporales</em> have independent origins

The Alphaproteobacteria is an extraordinarily diverse and ancient group of bacteria. Previous attempts to infer its deep phylogeny have been plagued with methodological artefacts. To overcome this, we analyzed a dataset of 200 single-copy and conserved genes and employed diverse strategies to reduce compositional artefacts. Such strategies include using novel dataset-specific profile mixture models and recoding schemes, and removing sites, genes and taxa that are compositionally biased. We show…