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A Concoction Pipeline for Generating Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units (MOTUs) Among Riparian and Aquatic Beetles

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TNT version 1.5, including a full implementation of phylogenetic morphometrics.

Pablo A Goloboff¹, Santiago A Catalano^1,2

¹Unidad Ejecutora Lillo, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Miguel Lillo 251, 4000 S.M. de Tucumán, Argentina.

Cladistics : the International Journal of the Willi Hennig Society

|November 3, 2021

Summary

Version 1.5 of the TNT program now integrates landmark data for phylogenetic analysis. This advancement significantly speeds up analyses, making landmark-based phylogenetics accessible on standard computers.

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Area of Science:

Computational Biology
Systematics
Morphometrics

Background:

Phylogenetic analysis traditionally uses discrete or continuous characters.
Integrating geometric morphometric data (landmark coordinates) into phylogenetic analyses presents computational challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

To introduce version 1.5 of the TNT program, which fully integrates landmark data into phylogenetic analyses.
To enhance the speed and feasibility of landmark-based phylogenetic analyses.

Main Methods:

TNT reconstructs ancestral shapes to minimize differences across tree branches, using this as the tree score.
Landmark data can be analyzed independently or combined with standard character data.
New algorithms accelerate landmark data searches by tens to hundreds of times (T to 3T speedup).

Main Results:

TNT version 1.5 seamlessly integrates 2D and 3D landmark data into phylogenetic workflows.
The program supports analysis of discrete and continuous characters, with automatic rescaling.
Significantly improved search algorithms make landmark-based phylogenetic analyses computationally tractable.

Conclusions:

TNT version 1.5 offers a powerful and efficient tool for integrating landmark data into phylogenetic studies.
The enhanced speed and integration capabilities democratize landmark-based phylogenetic analysis for researchers.
This advancement facilitates new avenues in evolutionary morphology and systematics research.