Estimating amino acid substitution models from genome datasets: A simulation study on the performance of estimated models

Estimating amino acid substitution models is a crucial task in bioinformatics. The maximum likelihood (ML) approach has been proposed to estimate amino acid substitution models from large datasets. The quality of newly estimated models is normally assessed by comparing with the existing models in building ML trees. Two important questions remained are the correlation of the estimated models with the true models and the required size of the training datasets to estimate reliable models. In this paper, we performed a simulation study to answer these two questions based on the simulated data. We simulated genome datasets with different number of genes/alignments based on predefined models (called true models) and predefined trees (called true trees). The simulated datasets were used to estimate amino acid substitution model using the ML estimation method. Our experiment showed that models estimated by the ML methods from simulated datasets with more than 100 genes have high correlations with the true models. The estimated models performed well in building ML trees in comparison with the true models. The results suggest that amino acid substitution models estimated by the ML methods from large genome datasets might play as reliable tool for analyzing amino acid sequences.