Abstract

The history of long-branch attraction, and in particular methods suggested to detect and avoid the artifact to date, is reviewed. Methods suggested to avoid LBA-artifacts include excluding long-branch taxa, excluding faster evolving third codon positions, using inference methods less sensitive to LBA such as likelihood, the Aguinaldo et al. approach, sampling more taxa to break up long branches and sampling more characters especially of another kind, and the pros and cons of these are discussed. Methods suggested to detect LBA are numerous and include methodological disconcordance, RASA, separate partition analyses, parametric simulation, random outgroup sequences, long-branch extraction, split decomposition and spectral analysis. Less than 10 years ago it was doubted if LBA occurred in real datasets. Today, examples are numerous in the literature and it is argued that the development of methods to deal with the problem is warranted. A 16 kbp dataset of placental mammals and a morphological and molecular combined dataset of gall wasps are used to illustrate the particularly common problem of LBA of problematic ingroup taxa to outgroups. The preferred methods of separate partition analysis, methodological disconcordance, and long branch extraction are used to demonstrate detection methods. It is argued that since outgroup taxa almost always represent long branches and are as such a hazard towards misplacing long branched ingroup taxa, phylogenetic analyses should always be run with and without the outgroups included. This will detect whether only the outgroup roots the ingroup or if it simultaneously alters the ingroup topology, in which case previous studies have shown that the latter is most often the worse. Apart from that LBA to outgroups is the major