To include or not to include: the impact of gene filtering on species tree estimation methods

With the increasing availability of whole genome data, many species trees are being constructed from hundreds to thousands of loci. Although concatenation analysis using maximum likelihood is a standard approach for estimating species trees, it does not account for gene tree heterogeneity, which can occur due to many biological processes, such as incomplete lineage sorting. Coalescent species tree estimation methods, many of which are statistically consistent in the presence of incomplete lineage sorting, include Bayesian methods that co-estimate the gene trees and the species tree, summary methods that compute the species tree by combining estimated gene trees, and site-based methods that infer the species tree from site patterns in the alignments of different loci. Due to concerns that poor quality loci will reduce the accuracy of estimated species trees, many recent phylogenomic studies have removed or filtered genes on the basis of phylogenetic signal and/or missing data prior to in...