Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Relaxed neighbor joining: a fast distance-based phylogenetic tree construction method.

Jason Evans1, Luke Sheneman, James Foster

  • 1Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, P.O. Box 443051, Moscow, ID 83844-3051, USA. jevans@uidaho.edu

Journal of Molecular Evolution
|June 6, 2006
PubMed
Summary

Relaxed Neighbor Joining (RNJ) offers a significantly faster method for constructing large phylogenetic trees compared to traditional Neighbor Joining (NJ). This computational biology advancement provides similar tree quality, making it ideal for large datasets and repetitive analyses.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Pediatric Oncology Knowledge Mobilization in Canada: A Environmental Scan.

Inquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financing·2026
Same author

Artificial intelligence in clinical occupational therapy: Current and future applications and practitioner insights.

Work (Reading, Mass.)·2026
Same author

Proline-rich, polybasic peptides are a structurally distinct class of amyloid-reactive peptides.

Amyloid : the international journal of experimental and clinical investigation : the official journal of the International Society of Amyloidosis·2026
Same author

Pediatric Oncology Knowledge Mobilization in Canada: Protocol for an Environmental Scan.

JMIR research protocols·2026
Same author

Virtual Reality Mastoidectomy as Precadaver Training for Novices: A Randomized Crossover Study.

The Laryngoscope·2026
Same author

Bees flexibly adjust decision strategies to information content in a foraging task.

Science advances·2026

Area of Science:

  • Computational Biology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Evolutionary Biology

Background:

  • Phylogenetic tree construction is crucial for understanding evolutionary relationships.
  • Vast amounts of sequence data necessitate efficient tree-building methods.
  • Traditional Neighbor Joining (NJ) becomes computationally prohibitive for large datasets.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and evaluate a faster variant of the Neighbor Joining (NJ) algorithm.
  • To assess the speed improvement and tree quality of the new Relaxed Neighbor Joining (RNJ) method compared to NJ.
  • To determine the suitability of RNJ for large-scale phylogenetic analyses.

Main Methods:

  • Development of the Relaxed Neighbor Joining (RNJ) algorithm, a variant of NJ.
  • Experimental comparison of RNJ and NJ algorithms on large datasets.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Assessment of tree construction speed and resulting tree topology quality.

    • Main Results:

    • RNJ demonstrates dramatic speed improvements over the standard NJ algorithm.
    • The phylogenetic trees generated by RNJ are of very similar quality to those produced by NJ.
    • RNJ generates a superset of trees compared to NJ in repeated runs.

    Conclusions:

    • RNJ is a computationally efficient and viable alternative to NJ for phylogenetic tree construction.
    • RNJ is particularly well-suited for analyses involving a large number of taxa.
    • The speed and quality of RNJ make it ideal for repetitive procedures like bootstrapping in phylogenetics.