Signal conflict in mitochondrial genes of land plants

Using a codon-naive maximum likelihood (ML) and non-parametric bootstrap (BS) analysis of the data set used by Sousa et al. (<i>PeerJ </i><b>8: </b>e8995; 2020) in combination with consensus networks one can explore and visualise the character and gene support for the found Septaphyta clade.<br>As outlined in the related post, <i></i><i>Can we dig too deep?</i> (a copy is provided as PDF here), the inferred Septaphyta clade is probably a model-induced branching artefact ("short-branch culling") rejected by most genes and poorly supported by character splits in a few other genes. The earlier alternative, mosses as first-diverging lineage of land plants, likely represents a data/signal artefact related to the primitive sequence structure of their mitochondrial genes.Overall, the analysis shows that mitochondrial genes provide little signal to resolve any deep splits in surviving land plants. <br><br>The xlsx spread sheet file tabulates the support of competing splits per gene. All files to reproduce the analysis and check the results are included in the 7z-archive.<br><br>