Customer Reviews

Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy: A How-To Manual, Second Edition (with CD-Rom)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was in desperate need to create some phylogenies of my data. After scouring the literature, I was supremely discouraged. However some above average to mediocre googling led me to this book and I quickly went to my institute of higher learning's library---unfortunately you won't find this in the average municipal library or books on wheels. This book lays out the steps very simple and plain, as well as the basic theory of how these algorithms work. It's pretty amazing work for a human that's just got into systemics in 1999.

Highly recommended!

Buy this if you must but there is a third edition. They complement each other to some extent but the third edition is more useful as it is more up to date and even slimmer and yet more powerful in that it totally obviates the need to pour over Paup. Here is a good treatment of Paup. Wonderful for beginners.

Review for the 3rd Edition (as Amazon only allow one review per set) - I now give it 5 stars and a title would be: Buy it, Do it ... or something similar.

Shortly after I got the second edition, I got the third. Within the covers of this slim volume is all the information you will need to generate the most elaborate hypotheses you may dare to venture on the basis of all the hard work you may have put into obtaining a data set of protein or DNA sequences.

The chapters are clearly laid out and this is a cook book - you can follow the instructions chapter by chapter using freely available software that it recommends. All the way from organizing your data, making an alignment and turning this into a simple tree, to computing genetic distances and finally producing trees by Baysian Inference or Maximum Likelihood.

Within certain relevant chapters are essays explaining the mathematical bases of tree building, models employed and the various kinds of trees and how they are built up - chapters on Trees, Neighbour Joining, Maximum Parsimony, Maximum Likelihood, Baysian Inference and there are downloadable programs that work fine as per the instructions like Fas2PhyNex which instantly transforms your Fasta file format into a Phylip and Nexus format. This book is a treasure trove of such packages and the simplest available descriptions of the sort of work you're up to at a level suitable for beginners and those with background (tells it to you straight without dumbing down). Those who go through your conclusions later may admire you for your profound understanding of the subject, on the basis of this book.

I feel the book could have tackled the following issues more clearly: 1. Establishing genetic distances for publications, uncorrected vs corrected - this book gives information on how to establish distances using the P distance model and the pairwise deletion option in MEGA - but I had to read further before realising it was sort of all there - but perhaps not emphasised enough (descriptions of new species frequently give uncorrected genetic distances at least). 2. Whether data from two different sequences for the same taxa should be combined to create a single data set for tree building, and when or when not to think about this (you can also make separate trees and combine them consensually). 3. What to do about gaps in the data - for example, I had several intact sequences of around 1kbp but a few were only 600bp - what problems would the shorter sequences cause? In the event, I had full and truncated data sets and trees for comparison. I found that having the odd short sequence was not too problematic - or at least, that's how it appeared.

This book is almost perfect, but it should be supplemented if you're a beginner (as with many books). I strongly recommend - Bioinformatics for Dummies. Using Bioinformatics, I realised that making alignments in T-coffee was better than using the MEGA multiple alignment system in terms of ironing out any errors that may be fiddly to correct by hand.

For information, whereas PHYML was superb for ML trees, I actually found that the ALRT bootstrap implementation just failed several times and went to use the traditional method. In a similar vein, I found the older versions of PHYML more effective that the latest, given sometimes the latest versions just did not deliver the goods.

I found that the author to be totally perspicacious and helpful and he has struggled so we don't have to. He has been wise to create such a slim volume - to paraphrase from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence - A Triumph. With a little supplementary reading (as this book recommends, do read the bits of the Mr Bayes Manual and take other pointers into account) the book is a gem - well worth the small cost and saving in Library space. I certainly look forward to future editions without begging for them as this book is so good.

Followed it fairly religiously and I will owe my upcoming award of a PhD in part to this helpful manual/friend.

Phylogenetic trees seem difficult to learn without some direction. This book provides direction in simple language. I've really only started with it, but it seems helpful.

This practical how-to guide was exactly what I needed. The author walks you through the process of building trees step by step with software freely available online. It even walks you through software installation when necessary. Absolutely perfect for someone who just wants to make a solid figure for a paper without getting a PhD in phylogenetics :)

Easy to understand and use, even if you are still learning english. Every step to make a phylogenetic tree is explained in such a way that is easy to work with your own data set. It contains background about molecular phylogeny.. Recomended.

I have to say this is a great book. I construct phylogenetic trees all the time, and this book not only can be used as a working manual, but also delivers basic background information. Plus, it was such a pleasue to read, as the author made every point clear and logic. The only thing I would suggest is that maybe the author can introduce several more programs in the next edition, such as PAUP, mafft, muscles, etc. All in all, it is Absolutely Excellent.

I received this product very quickly (just in time for the start of the semester) and it was in great condition. Thank you!

I find myself unable to rate the product because the cd was missing. pity because otherwise the service was excellent.

It is a very easy book to read and to use as a manual when you are building phylogenetic trees. I really recommend for beginners!
For people that already know a lot, can be helpful but not essential.

It strikes me as odd that a book dedicated to 'making phylogenetic trees easy' does not even mention the EXISTENCE of PAUP, the most widely-used and easy-to-understand phylogenetics package in existence, and one of only a few that include a graphical user interface. Add to the mix that PAUP is actually distributed by Sinauer (the publisher of this book), and that the second edition of the book contained entire chapters about PAUP and you've got yourself a real mystery.