Serious issues when loading .nexus file for morphological data

[Yasmin Asar]

Hi all, 

I have a nexus file of 35 plant species with 136 discrete morphological characters. These characters range from two-state to five-state. 

For some of the characters, for example, character 31, the character is two-state, with either 'absence' or presence'. However, only absence has been recorded for this character or 'missing'. So, the only two states recorded for this character are '0' or '?'.

As a result of this, the nexus file simply refuses to load into Beauti. I receive the following error message: 

"Something went wrong converting the alignment: cannot determine the number of possible states for character 31. There is no character description and there are fewer than two states for this character in the matrix. Please specify the number of possible states for characters in CHARSTATELABELS block"

I should also mention that I made sure to describe the number of states for each character in the STATELABELS block.

Can someone please suggest a fix for this? Should I simply remove character 31 from the data set? 

Thank you,

Yasmin 

[Pavel Rinkman]

Hello, Yasmin

In my view, it should be removed because it has a negligible number of information if there is no "presence" states.

Best,

Pavel

понедельник, 8 августа 2022 г. в 09:18:25 UTC+3, Yasmin Asar:

[Yasmin Asar]

Hi Pavel, 

Thanks for your suggestion. Yes- if there is no way to get around this, I will likely remove this character from my data set. 

Best,

Yasmin