The phrase "a minimum evolution tree" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts related to biology, phylogenetics, or computational methods where one discusses the simplest tree structure that explains the evolutionary relationships among a set of species or genes.
Example: "In our analysis, we constructed a minimum evolution tree to illustrate the most efficient evolutionary pathways among the sampled organisms."
Alternatives: "a minimal evolutionary tree" or "a least evolution tree".
A Minimum Evolution tree was generated by the Neighbor-Joining method with level 1 Close-Neighbor-Interchange.
Figure 1a shows a minimum evolution tree of the 40 post-vaccination era isolates.
We also used BioNJ (Gascuel 1997), which iteratively reduces the variance of distance estimates for a minimum evolution tree by applying weighted averages.
A Minimum Evolution tree (ME, Figure 3A) based on AFLP markers was calculated using PAUP 4.0 [ 56]; support for each node was obtained using bootstrap (1000 replicates, [ 57]).
A minimum evolution tree for L. casei MLST data was reconstructed by using MEGA based on the numbers of parsimoniously informative sites and the results of a bootstrapping test of strain phylogeny (Kumar et al. 2004).
The strains identified as S. pseudopneumoniae (including the type strain) clustered together but were not well resolved from the S. mitis cluster (bootstrap value of 92% for the node separating the S. pseudopneumoniae and S. mitis clusters on the neighbour-joining tree, but only 46% on a minimum evolution tree; see below).
A Minimum-Evolution tree was reconstructed from this matrix.
Relationships between the isolates was further explored by constructing a minimum-evolution tree using MEGA4 (27 ).
A Minimum-Evolution tree of amino acid sequences homologs to yaaW protein product was inferred using Poisson correction, constant rate homogeneity and 100 bootstrap replications, using MEGA3.1 software [ 34].
A minimum-evolution tree constructed from concatenated DNA sequences from the 7 MLST loci suggested that the Hie and Hif isolates in this study were evolutionarily closely related to each other but distantly related to 64 Hib isolates from the same period (data not shown).
Additional file 2 Table S2 shows the per site synonymous (K s) and non-synonymous values (K a), number of amino acid differences, and number of amino acid differences at positively selected amino acid sites between closely related sequences (pairs of sequences with an estimated amino acid divergence smaller than 5% when using a linearized Minimum Evolution tree).
