An analytical upper bound on the minimum number of recombinations in the history of SNP sequences in populations

recombination graph

When two trees go to war

Rooted phylogenetic networks are often constructed by combining trees, clusters, triplets or characters into a single network that in some well-defined sense simultaneously represents them all. We review these four models and investigate how they are related. In general, the model chosen influences the minimum number of reticulation events required. However, when one obtains the input data from two binary trees, we show that the minimum number of reticulations is independent of the model. The number of reticulations necessary to represent the trees, triplets, clusters (in the softwired sense) and characters (with unrestricted multiple crossover recombination) are all equal. Furthermore, we show that these results also hold when not the number of reticulations but the level of the constructed network is minimised. We use these unification results to settle several complexity questions that have been open in the field for some time. We also give explicit examples to show that already for data obtained from three binary trees the models begin to diverge

Phylogenetic Networks Do not Need to Be Complex: Using Fewer Reticulations to Represent Conflicting Clusters

Phylogenetic trees are widely used to display estimates of how groups of species evolved. Each phylogenetic tree can be seen as a collection of clusters, subgroups of the species that evolved from a common ancestor. When phylogenetic trees are obtained for several data sets (e.g. for different genes), then their clusters are often contradicting. Consequently, the set of all clusters of such a data set cannot be combined into a single phylogenetic tree. Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that can be used to display more complex evolutionary histories, including reticulate events such as hybridizations, recombinations and horizontal gene transfers. Here we present the new CASS algorithm that can combine any set of clusters into a phylogenetic network. We show that the networks constructed by CASS are usually simpler than networks constructed by other available methods. Moreover, we show that CASS is guaranteed to produce a network with at most two reticulations per biconnected component, whenever such a network exists. We have implemented CASS and integrated it in the freely available Dendroscope software

Computing galled networks from real data

Motivation: Developing methods for computing phylogenetic networks from biological data is an important problem posed by molecular evolution and much work is currently being undertaken in this area. Although promising approaches exist, there are no tools available that biologists could easily and routinely use to compute rooted phylogenetic networks on real datasets containing tens or hundreds of taxa. Biologists are interested in clades, i.e. groups of monophyletic taxa, and these are usually represented by clusters in a rooted phylogenetic tree. The problem of computing an optimal rooted phylogenetic network from a set of clusters, is hard, in general. Indeed, even the problem of just determining whether a given network contains a given cluster is hard. Hence, some researchers have focused on topologically restricted classes of networks, such as galled trees and level-k networks, that are more tractable, but have the practical draw-back that a given set of clusters will usually not possess such a representation

A Survey of Combinatorial Methods for Phylogenetic Networks

The evolutionary history of a set of species is usually described by a rooted phylogenetic tree. Although it is generally undisputed that bifurcating speciation events and descent with modifications are major forces of evolution, there is a growing belief that reticulate events also have a role to play. Phylogenetic networks provide an alternative to phylogenetic trees and may be more suitable for data sets where evolution involves significant amounts of reticulate events, such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, or recombination. In this article, we give an introduction to the topic of phylogenetic networks, very briefly describing the fundamental concepts and summarizing some of the most important combinatorial methods that are available for their computation

Species network inference under the multispecies coalescent model

Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019Species network inference is a challenging problem in phylogenetics. In this work, we present two results on this. The first shows that many topological features of a level-1 network are identifable under the network multispecies coalescent model (NMSC). Specifcally, we show that one can identify from gene tree frequencies the unrooted semidirected species network, after suppressing all cycles of size less than 4. The second presents the theory behind a new, statistically consistent, practical method for the inference of level-1 networks under the NMSC. The input for this algorithm is a collection of unrooted topological gene trees, and the output is an unrooted semidirected species network.Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: The network multispecies coalescent model -- 1. The coalescent model -- 2. The network multispecies coalescent model (NMSC) -- Chapter 3: Identifying species network features from gene tree quartets under the coalescent model -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Phylogenetic networks -- 3. Structure of level-1 networks -- 4. The network multispecies coalescent model and quartet concordance factors -- 5. Computing quartet concordance factors -- 6. The cycle property -- 7. The big cycle property -- 8. Identifying cycles in networks -- 9. Further results in 32-cycles -- 10. Discussion -- 11. Appendix -- Chapter 4: NANUQ: A method for inferring species networks from gene trees under the coalescent model -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Phylogenetic networks -- 3. The network multispecies coalescent model and quartet concordance factors -- 4. Network split systems and distances -- 5. Quartet distance for level-1 networks -- 6. Split networks from the network quartet distance -- 7. The NANUQ algorithm for inference of phylogenetic networks -- 8. Examples -- Chapter 5: Conclusions and future work - References