wag model for tree construction

Question

[ayeshamaqsood93.am]

what is wag model that is used in ML tree construction? i want to know in easy wordings.

Answer 1

[Dave Carlson]

It's an approximate ML model of amino acid substitution rates that combines useful aspects of previous models (e.g., the applicability to large datasets of the parsimony based methods and the use of likelihood in the ML methods) together into a single model.

You may be interested in reading the paper where the WAG model was originally introduced. If you don't need to know the all the details, the introduction is well written and should be sufficient for a basic description.

A General Empirical Model of Protein Evolution Derived from Multiple Protein Families Using a Maximum-Likelihood Approach