Discussion:
Unrooted Trees Relation to Five Taxa
We are given the following five sequence:
Taxon 1, Taxon 2, Taxon 3, Taxon 4, Taxon 5
TGCCAA, GGACAA, TGTCAA, TGTCAT, GGACAT
1) In general, how many unrooted trees are there relation five taxa?
2) Draw the following two trees. the first one has taxa 2 and 5 as sister taxa and taxa 1 and 3 as sister taxa. the second one has taxa 2 and 5 as sister taxa and taxa 3 and 4 as sister taxa.
3) Determine the minimum number of mutations that would be required to explain the observed sequences based on each of the two trees that you drew in part (b).
4) Based on the principle of parsimony, which of these trees would you argue bestfits the data?