Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference from Animal Mitocondrial Genome Arrangements

The determination of evolutionary relationships is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. Genome arrangement data is potentially more informative than DNA sequence data for inferring evolutionary relationships among distantly related taxa. We describe a Bayesian framework for phylogenetic inference from mitochondrial genome arrangement data using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We apply the method to assess evolutionary relationships among eight animal phyla.