Reconstructible phylogenetic networks: do not distinguish the indistinguishable.

ABSTRACT: Phylogenetic networks represent the evolution of organisms that have undergone reticulate events, such as recombination, hybrid speciation or lateral gene transfer. An important way to interpret a phylogenetic network is in terms of the trees it displays, which represent all the possible histories of the characters carried by the organisms in the network. Interestingly, however, different networks may display exactly the same set of trees, an observation that poses a problem for network reconstruction: from the perspective of many inference methods such networks are "indistinguishable". This is true for all methods that evaluate a phylogenetic network solely on the basis of how well the displayed trees fit the available data, including all methods based on input data consisting of clades,

SUBMITTER: Pardi F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4388854 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature