Estimating the history of mutations on a phylogeny

Evolution has left its signature on the molecules and morphology of living organisms. Ancestral reconstruction offers an excellent tool for understanding the process of evolution using comparative information. Methods for ancestral reconstruction have generally focused on reconstructing the ancestral states at the internal nodes of a phylogeny. Often, we are not interested in particular nodes of the phylogeny but the whole history of a character. This chapter focuses on a Bayesian method for estimating these histories, or mutational paths, on phylogenies. Mutational path methods differ most notably from other approaches in their ability to estimate not only the ancestral states at the internal nodes of a phylogeny, but also the order and timing of mutational changes across the phylogeny. The chapter provides a concise introduction to the statistical tools needed for sampling mutational paths on a phylogeny.