Does anyone know of an R package that does phylogenetic inference with the kind of data as in the attached file (which is a matrix of measurement data collected for 10 species over 15 metabolic tests)? Thanks.
You can of course build a tree from any sort of data. But this would not be a "genetic" tree, so using the term "phylogenetic" would be misleading. Also, just eyeballing your data, I am guessing any tree built from that data would be mis-informative rather than informative.
A phylogenetic tree (or a tree built to represent evolutionary history by using measured traits such as backbones, feathers/hair/scales, lungs/gills, wings/legs/fins, etc.) is supposed to represent the evolutionary history of a group of organisms. Inn order for this to work, the genes or traits have to be linked and inherited together from one generation to the next. With a lot of horizontal transfer and recombination, such as if birds could pick up gills by mating with fish, the exercise becomes a mess.
Just eyeballing your data, it does not look to me as though there are consistent trends or correlations that would create a useful tree.
https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/20/2/289/204981
Thanks, Brian. I just made up the data in Excel only to illustrate what I meant by measurement data. The values in the example provided are completely meaningless. Sorry I didn't mention that.
OK, let me rephrase: do you know if R can be used to make a phenogram from this kind of data? Thanks.
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