Linguistic analysis in phylogeny estimation: a case study of mtDNAs of Bovidae

Molecular phylogenetic studies are executed by the alignment of protein or nucleotide sequences, followed by the construction of trees according either to distance, parsimony or maximum likelihood methods. Linguistic analysis was investigated here as an alternative method to aligning sequences. In an empirical study, we inferred trees for a variable number of Bovidae and sister taxa based on three different mitochondrial orthologous sequences. Comparison of our results with existing phylogenies indicated that the method, except for some still disputable points, was able to establish sensible systematic relationships, similar to patterns of radiation of the family found in recent studies.