Felsenstein Phylogenetic Likelihood

Authors

David Posada
Keith A. Crandall, George Washington University

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-13-2021

Journal

Journal of molecular evolution

DOI

10.1007/s00239-020-09982-w

Keywords

Evolution; Maximum likelihood; Models of nucleotide substitution; Phylogeny.

Abstract

In 1981, the Journal of Molecular Evolution (JME) published an article entitled "Evolutionary trees from DNA sequences: A maximum likelihood approach" by Joseph (Joe) Felsenstein (J Mol Evol 17:368-376, 1981). This groundbreaking work laid the foundation for the emerging field of statistical phylogenetics, providing a tractable way of finding maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of evolutionary trees from DNA sequence data. This paper is the second most cited (more than 9000 citations) in JME after Kimura's (J Mol Evol 16:111-120, 1980) seminal paper on a model of nucleotide substitution (with nearly 20,000 citations). On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of JME, we elaborate on the significance of Felsenstein's ML approach to estimating phylogenetic trees.

Comments

This is an open access PubMed Central article.

Recommended Citation

Posada, D., & Crandall, K. A. (2021). Felsenstein Phylogenetic Likelihood. Journal of molecular evolution, (). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00239-020-09982-w

Peer Reviewed

1

Open Access

1