Shaking the Diptera tree of life: performance analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial sequence data partitions

The value of mitochondrial versus nuclear gene sequence data in phylogenetic analysis has received much attention without yielding definitive conclusions. Theoretical arguments and empirical data suggest a lower phylogenetic utility than equivalent nuclear gene sequences, but there are many examples of important progress made using mitochondrial sequences. We undertook a systematic performance analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear sequence partitions taken from a representative sample of dipteran species. When analysed alone, mitochondrial genes generally performed less well than nuclear genes; however, these genes resolved some branches for which nuclear genes failed. Moreover, the combined use of mitochondrial and nuclear sequences produced superior results without artifacts for nodes where mitochondrial and nuclear gene data generated conflicting topologies. These findings strongly advocate the inclusion of mitochondrial sequences, even in deep phylogeny reconstruction. Comparison of tree support between our and previous analyses identified robustly supported high-confidence clades in the Diptera, but also revealed problematic groupings in need of further analysis.