Data from: Testing for Universal Common Ancestry

A phylogenetic model selection test to quantify the evidence for the Universal Common Ancestry (UCA) of life forms was proposed recently and applied in the confirmation of the common origin of a data set of universally conserved proteins spanning the three domains of life (Theobald 2010). While there is no question of the common ancestry of the particular set of aligned sequences analyzed, the UCA test has been criticized on several grounds (Koonin and Wolf 2010; Yonezawa and Hasegawa 2010, Martins and Posada 2012). In our simulations, the original UCA test showed bias towards common ancestry even for data sets simulated under independent origins, but this bias almost disappeared when we coestimated alignment and phylogeny for each competing hypothesis.

近日，一项用于量化生命形式通用共同祖先（Universal Common Ancestry, UCA）证据的系统发育模型选择检验被提出，并被应用于验证覆盖生命三大域的通用保守蛋白数据集的共同起源（Theobald 2010）。尽管所分析的特定比对序列集的共同祖先身份毋庸置疑，但UCA检验仍受到多方面的批评（Koonin and Wolf 2010; Yonezawa and Hasegawa 2010; Martins and Posada 2012）。在本研究的模拟实验中，原始UCA检验即便对于独立起源模拟生成的数据集，也表现出偏向共同祖先的偏差；但当我们针对每一个竞争性假说联合估计序列比对与系统发育关系时，该偏差几乎消失。