Scale bar

The scale bar unit depends on the distance measure used and the tree construction algorithm used. The trees produced using the Maximum Likelihood Phylogeny tool has a very specific interpretation: A distance of x means that the expected number of substitutions/changes per nucleotide (amino acid for protein sequences) is x. i.e. if the distance between two taxa is 0.01, you expected a change in each nucleotide independently with probability 1 %. For the remaining algorithms, there is not as nice an interpretation. The distance depends on the weight given to different mutations as specified by the distance measure.