The Closest BLAST Hit Is Often Not the Nearest Neighbor

It is well known that basing phylogenetic reconstructions on uncorrected genetic distances can lead to errors in their reconstruction. Nevertheless, it is often common practice to report simply the most similar BLAST (Altschul et al. 1997) hit in genomic reports that discuss many genes (Ruepp et al. 2000; Freiberg et al. 1997). This is because BLAST hits can provide a rapid, efficient, and concise analysis of many genes at once. These hits are …