Dutchscientist (the real one)

dutchscientist.bsky.social

22 July 2026 18:48

My pleasure. Trees based on sequence alignments will show the effects of differences in sequence, but need interpretation to use that for evolutionary conclusions. Bootstrapping analysis just says something about the tree construction process, and how reliable the branching is. A bit like p-values!

Dutchscientist (the real one)

dutchscientist.bsky.social

22 July 2026 18:48

And like p-values, bootstrapping values are expected, whether useful or not 😉

Steven Robbins

stevenjrobbins.bsky.social

22 July 2026 18:48

It's out! Excited to present the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database (GBR-MGD), a comprehensive DB of 1000s of high-quality prokaryote, virus, plasmid, and chromosome-level eukaryote MAGs using Nanopore long reads. Subthreads incoming. Please share widely. 🙂 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Erik van Nimwegen

erikvannimwegen.bsky.social

21 July 2026 23:12

that the bootstrap values or posteriors are of much interest for such data in any case. In the BEST case scenario they reflect uncertainty due only to the data being a finite sample under the assumption that ALL assumptions the model makes are true.

Dutchscientist (the real one)

dutchscientist.bsky.social

21 July 2026 23:12

It depends very much how they did the bootstrapping. If done with MEGA, not much, as that is a "cheating" way of fast bootstrapping. Did they do bootstrapping (replacement) or jackknifing (deletion)? But it say mostly something about the alignments, treeing algorithm and topology, not evolution.