Problems with single individual in Starbeast outgroups?

[Dylan Ohearn]

Hello,

I'm soon going to be running a starbeast analysis to generate a species tree using 3 mitochondrial and 3 nuclear genes, with 5 species of interest and multiple outgroups.

The ingroup species are mostly well sampled although one has only two individuals.  In the outgroup species however, there are some with only one individual.  So I'm wondering whether this is likely to present a problem with the analysis (either mechanistically or just because it's not considered proper) and whether it makes any difference that it's just the outgroup species or that they have diploid nuclear genes.

Thanks!

[Jordan Douglas]

Hi Dylan,

Everything seems reasonable the way you have described it. You do not need more than 1 individual per species for the method to work. However, species which have only 1 individual will give no information on their effective population size because there are no coalescence events.

Hope this helps,

Jordan