What is phylogeny?
Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of an organism. Phylogeny can be used to study the similarities and differences between organisms [1].
Phylogeny of the NTRK1 Protein
Human NTRK1 protein was compared to six different species - chimpanzee, chicken, cattle, mouse, zebra fish and Arabidopsis - in order to obtain the phylogenetic trees below. The phylogenetic trees were constructed using ClustalW2. The methods neighbor joining and average distance were used to construct the phylogenetic trees pictured below. The neighbor joining method uses evolutionary distance data to find pairs of operational taxonomic units to minimize the total branch length at each stage of clustering [2]. The average distance method uses percent sequence identity to calculate the average distance between branches.
clustalw2_alignment | |
File Size: | 9 kb |
File Type: | clustalw2 alignment |
Discussion and Analysis
In both trees the chimpanzee NTRK1 protein homolog is most similar to the human NTRK1 protein. In the neighbor joining tree the chicken is the least similar protein homolog. In the average distance tree the chicken and the zebra fish are the least similar protein homologs to the NTRK1 protein. In both trees the cattle, mouse and Arabidopsis each have their own branch with the cattle being more homologous than Arabidopsis to humans and chimpanzees.