UPGMA Worked Example

A walkthrough of clustering 7 biological sequences (A-G) using the Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) method. Note that UPGMA is actually a generic method and thus the walkthrough could apply to any objects A-G for which pairwise distances can be calculated. A small CGI site for generating a UPGMA tree from a distance matrix can be found here. The source data for this worked example is a subset of Cytochrome C distances from Table 3 of one of the seminal phylogenetic papers: Fitch WM & Margoliash E (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. Science 155:279-84. PowerPoint timings are set up to be consistent with autolooping the presentation.

Keywords: Molecular phylogeny, Phylogenetics, Upgma

Target audience: Beginners

Authors: Richard Edwards

Remote created date: 2014-08-04

Remote updated date: 2017-10-09


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