Parsimony informative sites

Total Number of Aligned Characters Variable Characters and Number of Parsimony Informative Sites of the Data Subsets Used in the Combined Analyses... 

A total of 5462 positions were aligned, of which 2730 were gapped positions that were excluded due to ambiguity. Of the remaining sites, 1648 were constant sites, and 493 were phylogenetically informative sites using the parsimony criterion. The 28S data... 

Although distance methods have certain advantages for the analysis of restriction site data, notably their computational efficiency, they also have an important disadvantage. By reducing the data to pairwise distances, important information on the evolutionary history of individual restriction sites is lost. In chloroplast DNA, for example, individual sites often evolve at very different rates. A parsimony analysis of 328 restriction site mutations shared among two or more taxa in a survey of 57 taxa from the sunflower family showed that 186 of the sites had only a single mutation, whereas 6 sites showed nine or more mutations.24 A conservative statistical... 

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