Analysis of Phylogenetic Trees

(Program used: Jalview)

(Program used: UniProt)

After making two trees (one being based on pollen while the other is based on plant sequences) we, as a group, were a little surprised with the differences in results. The "guide tree" we made on UniProt and the official tree we made on Jalview showed that the Calla lily and Asian lily is more similar than the Daylily. It caught our attention because we all thought the Daylilies and Asian lilies would have much more in common with each other. Not only does their pollen look almost identical, but they also share most of the same physical attributes.

As a group, we came to the conclusion that we trust the results of our pollen tree more than the alignment because we can actually look at the similarities and differences using a SEM with our own eyes rather than trusting the tree based protein alignments. If the alignments were correct than that would throw us for a loop and we all would want to further investigate this to figure out and understand exactly what makes Calla lilies more similar to Asian lilies than Asian lilies being similar to the Daylilies.