Abstract

A fundamental task in sequence analysis is to calculate the probability of a multiple alignment given a phylogenetic tree relating the sequences and an evolutionary model describing how sequences change over time. However, the most widely used phylogenetic models only account for residue substitution events. We describe a probabilistic model of a multiple sequence alignment that accounts for insertion and deletion events in addition to substitutions, given a phylogenetic tree, using a rate matrix augmented by the gap character. Starting from a continuous Markov process, we construct a non-reversible generative (birth–death) evolutionary model for insertions and deletions. The model assumes that insertion and deletion events occur one residue at a time. We apply this model to phylogenetic tree inference by extending the program DNAML in PHYLIP. Using standard benchmarking methods on simulated data and a new ‘‘concordance test’ ’ benchmark on real ribosomal RNA alignments, we show that the extended program DNAMLe improves accuracy relative to the usual approach of ignoring gaps, while retaining the computational efficiency of the Felsenstein peeling algorithm.