PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - V. Berry
AU  - F. Chevenet
AU  - J-P. Doyon
AU  - E. Jousselin
TI  - A geography aware reconciliation method to investigate host/parasite cospeciation
AID  - 10.1101/166215
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 166215
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/20/166215.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/20/166215.full
AB  - Cospeciation studies aim at investigating whether hosts and symbionts speciate simultaneously or whether the associations diversify through host shifts. This problem is often tackled through reconciliation analyses that map the symbiont phylogeny onto the host phylogeny by mixing different types of diversification events. These reconciliations generate numerous scenarios that are difficult to interpret and not always biologically realistic. Researchers have underlined that the biogeographic histories of both hosts and symbionts influence the probability of cospeciation and host switches, but up to now no reconciliation software integrate geographic data. We present a new functionality in the Mowgli software that bridges this gap. The user can provide geographic information on both the host and symbiont extant and ancestral taxa. Constraints in the reconciliation algorithm have been implemented to generate biologically realistic codiversification scenarios. In addition, we updated the reconciliation viewer SylvX in order to visualize ancestral characters states on the phylogenetic trees. We apply our method to the fig/fig wasp association, a textbook example of cospeciation, and demonstrate that it generates cospeciation scenarios that are geographically consistent. In addition, we show that the comparison of reconciliations obtained with and without geographic constraints can help solving ambiguities in the biogeographic histories of the partners. With the development of robust methods in historical biogeography and the advent of next generation sequencing that leads to better-resolved trees, a geography aware reconciliation method represents a substantial advance that is likely to be useful to researchers studying the evolution of biotic interactions and biogeography.