Love Gutierrez (zebrastep6)

If all nucleotide sites evolved at the same rate within molecules and throughout the history of lineages, if all nucleotides were in equal proportion, if any nucleotide or amino acid evolved to any other with equal probability, if all taxa could be sampled, if diversification happened at well-spaced intervals, and if all gene segments had the same history, then tree building would be easy. But of course none of those conditions are true. Hence the need for evaluating the information content and accuracy of phylogenetic trees. The symposium for which this historial essay and presentation were developed focused on the importance of phylogenetic support, specifically branch support for individual clades. Here I present a timeline and review significant events in the history of systematics that set the stage for the development of the sophisticated measures of branch support and examinations of the information content of data highlighted in this symposium.Osteochondromas are benign bone tumors that arise from divergent cartilage formation most commonly in childhood versus adulthood. We report the case of a 42-year-old healthy female who presented with a unusual solitary posterolateral ankle mass with associated pain and ankle impingement with 6 weeks follow up. The patient was successfully treated with open surgical excision with bone with pathology diagnosis of benign osteochondroma. The patient returned to normal baseline function with no pain at 6 weeks follow up. Open posterior ankle incision approach performed to remove suspicious enlarged bony growth from posterior talar process sent to pathology. Pathology report returned benign osteochondroma of the posterior talar process and patient subsequently had routine healing of post op incision site and return to full function without pain or disability at 6 weeks follow up. This case study adds to the current understanding, incidence, occurrence, and treatment of rare osteochondromas occurring in the posterior talar process. Mendelian randomization is an epidemiological technique that uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to estimate the causal effect of a risk factor on an outcome. We consider a scenario in which causal estimates based on each variant in turn differ more strongly than expected by chance alone, but the variants can be divided into distinct clusters, such that all variants in the cluster have similar causal estimates. This scenario is likely to occur when there are several distinct causal mechanisms by which a risk factor influences an outcome with different magnitudes of causal effect. We have developed an algorithm MR-Clust that finds such clusters of variants, and so can identify variants that reflect distinct causal mechanisms. Two features of our clustering algorithm are that it accounts for differential uncertainty in the causal estimates, and it includes 'null' and 'junk' clusters, to provide protection against the detection of spurious clusters. Our algorithm correctly detected the number of clusters in a simulation analysis, outperforming methods that either do not account for uncertainty or do not include null and junk clusters. In an applied example considering the effect of blood pressure on coronary artery disease risk, the method detected four clusters of genetic variants. A post hoc hypothesis-generating search suggested that variants in the cluster with a negative effect of blood pressure on coronary artery disease risk were more strongly related to trunk fat percentage and other adiposity measures than variants not in this cluster. MR-Clust can be downloaded from https//github.com/cnfoley/mrclust. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.Despite significant advances in invertebrate phylogenomics over the past decade, the higher-level phylogeny of Pycnogonida (sea spiders) remains elusive. Due to the inaccessibility