Methodologies for Microbial Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction

Abstract

The reconstruction of genetic material of ancestral organisms constitutes a powerful application of evolutionary biology. A fundamental step in this inference is the ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR), which can be performed with diverse methodologies implemented in computer frameworks. However, most of these methodologies ignore evolutionary properties frequently observed in microbes, such as genetic recombination and complex selection processes, that can bias the traditional ASR. From a practical perspective, here I review methodologies for the reconstruction of ancestral DNA and protein sequences, with particular focus on microbes, and including biases, recommendations, and software implementations. I conclude that microbial ASR is a complex analysis that should be carefully performed and that there is a need for methods to infer more realistic ancestral microbial sequences.

Keywords: Ancestral sequence reconstruction; Microbial evolution; Molecular evolution; Recombination; Substitution model.