The rapid increase in the number of actors and issues on the global health agenda has galvanized the search for greater alignment and concerted actions, with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 being one example of a broader effort to reduce waste and duplication [ 10].
Achieving alignment from leaders requires concerted effort starting from the point of hire or promotion.
A cladistic criterion was applied to each sequence alignment 'C', to infer concerted evolution, i.e., where paralogous sequences within a species looked more alike than their putative homoeologs in other species.
This observation confirms our earlier conclusion from direct inspection of the sequence alignment; i.e. that concerted evolution within species does clearly take place between class Ia and class Ib sequences, at least for the sequences of the α3 domains.
In contrast to such diversifying processes, the phylogenetic relationships of tandem duplicates from closely related Trypanosoma spp., and conflicting phylogenetic signals from alignments of tandem duplicates, indicated that both concerted evolution and gene conversion affect tandem duplicates in T. brucei.
Duplicate sequences were combined with homoeologous sequences (i.e., homologous sequences occurring at the same genomic position) from five other trypanosomatid species and several criteria were applied to the multiple alignments to identify the molecular signatures of concerted evolution and gene conversion.
In summary, most phylogenies of homologs from various species (alignment 'C', see methods) showed some evidence of concerted evolution, although many arrays could not be tested because they were only present in T. brucei.
In the elephant lice and the sucking lice that have fragmented mt genomes, however, both independent evolution and concerted evolution were observed between the two tRNA genes for leucine (Fig. 4C; Alignment S5).
The most widely studied characteristic related to concerted mutational behaviour is the so-called 'correlated mutations' within multiple sequence alignments (MSAs).
It was, in fact, exactly the reverse, i.e. :" With how few sequences can we proceed to demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt, that MHC class I loci do undergo concerted evolution ?" All the figures presented in the paper were obtained from the one alignment we settled for in the end.
Statistical evaluation of the concerted evolution hypothesis was obtained using a Shimodaria-Hasegawa test (SH, [ 78]), applied to alignment C; the test was executed using DNAml in the PHYLIP 3.65 package [ 79].
