Müller KF
Forschungsartikel (Zeitschrift) | Peer reviewedThe Bremer support (BS, Bremer, 1988, 1994;Källersjö et al., 1992), also known as decay index (Olmstead et al., 1993), length difference (Faith1991), or support index (SI, Davis, 1993; Kluge and Farris, 1969), is a measure of branch support frequently seen in the recent phylogenetic literature. The strengths and limits of this index have lately been examined (DeBry, 2001; Oxelman et al., 1999) and it was generally concluded that care must be taken when interpreting the values. In particular, the calculation of BS becomes problematic for intermediate to large data sets. Either, the resulting support values will be sometimes drastic overestimates of support (Bremer, 1994) or, if more thorough search strategies are invoked to assess support of all the individual branches, the process will become a very time consuming task (Oxelman et al., 1999). Various procedures have been suggested for computationally more demanding data sets (Davis, 1995; Morgan, 1997), and the reverse constraint method has emerged as most effective (Morgan, 1997). The power of all approaches, however, strongly depends on the ability of the applied heuristic search strategy to find shortest trees. With the common search strategies and the currently available processor speed, this ability shrinks rapidly as matrix sizes grow to more than 100-150 taxa (although strongly depending on the data set).......
Müller, Kai | Arbeitsgruppe Evolution und Biodiversität der Pflanzen (Prof. Müller) |