How Much Information is Needed to Infer Reticulate Evolutionary Histories?

• DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syu076
• Publication Date: 2014-09-19T03:29:33Z
• Authors: Katharina T. Huber; Leo Van Iersel; Vincent Moulton; Taoyang Wu
• Keywords: Reticulate; Reticulate evolution; Tree (set theory)

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of evolutionary trees and an important tool for analyzing reticulate histories. Recently, there has been great interest in developing new methods to construct rooted phylogenetic networks, that is, whose internal vertices correspond hypothetical ancestors, leaves sampled taxa, which with more than one parent taxa formed by events such as recombination or hybridization. Several constructing use the strategy building up tree from simpler blocks (such triplets clusters), so it is natural look ways smaller networks. In this article, we shall demonstrate fundamental issue approach. Namely, show even if given all subnetworks induced on proper subsets some network, still do not have information required completely determine network. This implies history were be taken input any network method, method might output incorrect history. We also discuss potential consequences result