Wolbachia supergroup R?

​In my first blog post, I will discuss a recent paper about Wolbachia classification.

In a recent study, Wang et al. (2016) investigated Wolbachia sequences from cave spiders (Telema ssp.). They found that these belong to a genetic lineage distinct from all other described Wolbachia strains (in Wolbachia, those genetically distinct lineages are called “supergroups”). I re-analysed these data and found that in fact, Wolbachia strains from cave spiders cluster within supergroup A (Gerth 2016).

[If you are unfamiliar with Wolbachia biology, or the supergroup classification system, the excellent review by Werren et al. (2008) is a good starting point.]

After I uploaded my re-analysis to bioRxiv, Guan-Hong Wang has kindly send me the alignment files they used in their study. In this post, I want to try to use these data and illustrate why their and my analysis are discordant and also, why their conclusions are likely misled.

Read More