Reconstructing reticulate evolution in species: theory and practice

  • Authors:
  • Luay Nakhleh;Tandy Warnow;C. Randal Linder

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • RECOMB '04 Proceedings of the eighth annual international conference on Resaerch in computational molecular biology
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

We present new methods for reconstructing reticulate evolution of species due to events such as horizontal transfer or hybrid speciation; both methods are based upon extensions of Wayne Maddison's approach in his seminal 1997 paper. Our first method is a polynomial time algorithm for constructing phylogenetic networks from two gene trees contained inside the network. We allow the network to have an arbitrary number of reticulations, but we limit the reticulation in the network so that the cycles in network are node-disjoint ("galled"); we prove accuracy guarantees for our first method by presenting a formal characterization of the set of gene trees defined by a species network. Our second method is a polynomial time algorithm for constructing networks with one reticulation, where we allow for errors in the estimated gene trees. Using simulations, we demonstrate improved performance of this method over both NeighborNet and Maddison's method.