Split-inducing indels in phylogenomic analysis

Background: Most phylogenetic studies using molecular data treat gaps in multiple sequence alignments as missing data or even completely exclude alignment columns that contain gaps. Results: Here we show that gap patterns in large-scale, genome-wide alignments are themselves phylogenetically informative and can be used to infer reliable phylogenies provided the gap data are properly filtered to reduce noise introduced by the alignment method. We introduce here the notion of split-inducing indels (splids) that define an approximate bipartition of the taxon set. We show both in simulated data and in case studies on real-life data that splids can be efficiently extracted from phylogenomic data sets. Conclusions: Suitably processed gap patterns extracted from genome-wide alignment provide a surprisingly clear phylogenetic signal and an allow the inference of accurate phylogenetic trees.