UPGMA Worked Example

by | Aug 4, 2014

A walkthrough of clustering 7 biological sequences (A-G) using the Unweighted Pair-Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) method. Note that UPGMA is actually a generic method and thus the walkthrough could apply to any objects A-G for which pairwise distances can be calculated. A small CGI site for generating a UPGMA tree from a distance matrix can be found here. The source data for this worked example is a subset of Cytochrome C distances from Table 3 of one of the seminal phylogenetic papers: Fitch WM & Margoliash E (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. Science 155:279-84. PowerPoint timings are set up to be consistent with autolooping the presentation.