Who is Who in Phylogenetic Networks

Publications of Year 2010

Article (Journal)

1 Gabriel Cardona, Mercè Llabrés and Francesc Rosselló. Two Results on Distances for Phylogenetic Networks. In Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, Vol. 74:93-100, 2010. Keywords: distance between networks, explicit network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, tree sibling network. Note: http://www.merilibrary.com/books/bioinformatics/advances%20in%20bioinformatics.pdf#page=103.         2 Zhi-Zhong Chen and Lusheng Wang. HybridNET: a tool for constructing hybridization networks. In BIO, Vol. 26(22):2912-2913, 2010. Keywords: agreement forest, FPT, from rooted trees, hybridization, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program HybridNET, software. Note: http://rnc.r.dendai.ac.jp/~chen/papers/note2.pdf.         Toggle abstract "Motivations: When reticulation events occur, the evolutionary history of a set of existing species can be represented by a hybridization network instead of an evolutionary tree. When studying the evolutionary history of a set of existing species, one can obtain a phylogenetic tree of the set of species with high confidence by looking at a segment of sequences or a set of genes. When looking at another segment of sequences, a different phylogenetic tree can be obtained with high confidence too. This indicates that reticulation events may occur. Thus, we have the following problem: given two rooted phylogenetic trees on a set of species that correctly represent the tree-like evolution of different parts of their genomes, what is the hybridization network with the smallest number of reticulation events to explain the evolution of the set of species under consideration? Results: We develop a program, named HybridNet, for constructing a hybridization network with the minimum number of reticulate vertices from two input trees. We first implement the O(3dn)-time algorithm by Whidden et al. for computing a maximum (acyclic) agreement forest. Our program can output all the maximum (acyclic) agreement forests. We then augment the program so that it can construct an optimal hybridization network for each given maximum acyclic agreement forest. To our knowledge, this is the first time that optimal hybridization networks can be rapidly constructed. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved." 3 Robert G. Beiko. Gene sharing and genome evolution: networks in trees and trees in networks. In Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 25(4):659-673, 2010. Keywords: abstract network, explicit network, from rooted trees, galled network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program Dendroscope, Program SplitsTree, reconstruction, split network, survey. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9217-3.         Toggle abstract "Frequent lateral genetic transfer undermines the existence of a unique "tree of life" that relates all organisms. Vertical inheritance is nonetheless of vital interest in the study of microbial evolution, and knowing the "tree of cells" can yield insights into ecological continuity, the rates of change of different cellular characters, and the evolutionary plasticity of genomes. Notwithstanding within-species recombination, the relationships most frequently recovered from genomic data at shallow to moderate taxonomic depths are likely to reflect cellular inheritance. At the same time, it is clear that several types of 'average signals' from whole genomes can be highly misleading, and the existence of a central tendency must not be taken as prima facie evidence of vertical descent. Phylogenetic networks offer an attractive solution, since they can be formulated in ways that mitigate the misleading aspects of hybrid evolutionary signals in genomes. But the connections in a network typically show genetic relatedness without distinguishing between vertical and lateral inheritance of genetic material. The solution may lie in a compromise between strict tree-thinking and network paradigms: build a phylogenetic network, but identify the set of connections in the network that are potentially due to vertical descent. Even if a single tree cannot be unambiguously identified, choosing a subnetwork of putative vertical connections can still lead to drastic reductions in the set of candidate vertical hypotheses. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V." 4 Joel Velasco and Elliott Sober. Testing for Treeness: Lateral Gene Transfer, Phylogenetic Inference, and Model Selection. In Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 25(4):675-687, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, model selection, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, statistical model. Note: http://joelvelasco.net/Papers/velascosober-testingfortreeness.pdf.         Toggle abstract "A phylogeny that allows for lateral gene transfer (LGT) can be thought of as a strictly branching tree (all of whose branches are vertical) to which lateral branches have been added. Given that the goal of phylogenetics is to depict evolutionary history, we should look for the best supported phylogenetic network and not restrict ourselves to considering trees. However, the obvious extensions of popular tree-based methods such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood face a serious problem-if we judge networks by fit to data alone, networks that have lateral branches will always fit the data at least as well as any network that restricts itself to vertical branches. This is analogous to the well-studied problem of overfitting data in the curve-fitting problem. Analogous problems often have analogous solutions and we propose to treat network inference as a case of model selection and use the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Strictly tree-like networks are more parsimonious than those that postulate lateral as well as vertical branches. This leads to the conclusion that we should not always infer LGT events whenever it would improve our fit-to-data, but should do so only when the improved fit is larger than the penalty for adding extra lateral branches. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V." 5 Leo van Iersel, Charles Semple and Mike Steel. Quantifying the Extent of Lateral Gene Transfer Required to Avert a 'Genome of Eden'. In BMB, Vol. 72:1783–1798, 2010. Note: http://www.win.tue.nl/~liersel/LGT.pdf.         Toggle abstract "The complex pattern of presence and absence of many genes across different species provides tantalising clues as to how genes evolved through the processes of gene genesis, gene loss, and lateral gene transfer (LGT). The extent of LGT, particularly in prokaryotes, and its implications for creating a 'network of life' rather than a 'tree of life' is controversial. In this paper, we formally model the problem of quantifying LGT, and provide exact mathematical bounds, and new computational results. In particular, we investigate the computational complexity of quantifying the extent of LGT under the simple models of gene genesis, loss, and transfer on which a recent heuristic analysis of biological data relied. Our approach takes advantage of a relationship between LGT optimization and graph-theoretical concepts such as tree width and network flow. © 2010 Society for Mathematical Biology." 6 Stephen J. Willson. Properties of normal phylogenetic networks. In BMB, Vol. 72(2):340-358, 2010. Keywords: normal network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, regular network. Note: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~swillson/RestrictionsOnNetworkspap9.pdf, slides available at http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/webseminars/pg+ws/2007/plg/plgw01/0904/willson/.         Toggle abstract "A phylogenetic network is a rooted acyclic digraph with vertices corresponding to taxa. Let X denote a set of vertices containing the root, the leaves, and all vertices of outdegree 1. Regard X as the set of vertices on which measurements such as DNA can be made. A vertex is called normal if it has one parent, and hybrid if it has more than one parent. The network is called normal if it has no redundant arcs and also from every vertex there is a directed path to a member of X such that all vertices after the first are normal. This paper studies properties of normal networks. Under a simple model of inheritance that allows homoplasies only at hybrid vertices, there is essentially unique determination of the genomes at all vertices by the genomes at members of X if and only if the network is normal. This model is a limiting case of more standard models of inheritance when the substitution rate is sufficiently low. Various mathematical properties of normal networks are described. These properties include that the number of vertices grows at most quadratically with the number of leaves and that the number of hybrid vertices grows at most linearly with the number of leaves. © 2009 Society for Mathematical Biology." 7 Miguel Arenas, Mateus Patricio, David Posada and Gabriel Valiente. Characterization of Phylogenetic Networks with NetTest. In BMCB, Vol. 11:268, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, galled tree, phylogenetic network, Program NetTest, software, time consistent network, tree sibling network, tree-child network, visualization. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-11-268, software available at http://darwin.uvigo.es/software/nettest/.         Toggle abstract "Background: Typical evolutionary events like recombination, hybridization or gene transfer make necessary the use of phylogenetic networks to properly depict the evolution of DNA and protein sequences. Although several theoretical classes have been proposed to characterize these networks, they make stringent assumptions that will likely not be met by the evolutionary process. We have recently shown that the complexity of simulated networks is a function of the population recombination rate, and that at moderate and large recombination rates the resulting networks cannot be categorized. However, we do not know whether these results extend to networks estimated from real data.Results: We introduce a web server for the categorization of explicit phylogenetic networks, including the most relevant theoretical classes developed so far. Using this tool, we analyzed statistical parsimony phylogenetic networks estimated from ~5,000 DNA alignments, obtained from the NCBI PopSet and Polymorphix databases. The level of characterization was correlated to nucleotide diversity, and a high proportion of the networks derived from these data sets could be formally characterized.Conclusions: We have developed a public web server, NetTest (freely available from the software section at http://darwin.uvigo.es), to formally characterize the complexity of phylogenetic networks. Using NetTest we found that most statistical parsimony networks estimated with the program TCS could be assigned to a known network class. The level of network characterization was correlated to nucleotide diversity and dependent upon the intra/interspecific levels, although no significant differences were detected among genes. More research on the properties of phylogenetic networks is clearly needed. © 2010 Arenas et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd." 8 Sophie Abby, Eric Tannier, Manolo Gouy and Vincent Daubin. Detecting lateral gene transfers by statistical reconciliation of phylogenetic forests. In BMCB, Vol. 11:324, 2010. Keywords: agreement forest, explicit network, from rooted trees, from species tree, heuristic, lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program EEEP, Program PhyloNet, Program Prunier, reconstruction, software. Note: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/11/324.         Toggle abstract "Background: To understand the evolutionary role of Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT), accurate methods are needed to identify transferred genes and infer their timing of acquisition. Phylogenetic methods are particularly promising for this purpose, but the reconciliation of a gene tree with a reference (species) tree is computationally hard. In addition, the application of these methods to real data raises the problem of sorting out real and artifactual phylogenetic conflict.Results: We present Prunier, a new method for phylogenetic detection of LGT based on the search for a maximum statistical agreement forest (MSAF) between a gene tree and a reference tree. The program is flexible as it can use any definition of "agreement" among trees. We evaluate the performance of Prunier and two other programs (EEEP and RIATA-HGT) for their ability to detect transferred genes in realistic simulations where gene trees are reconstructed from sequences. Prunier proposes a single scenario that compares to the other methods in terms of sensitivity, but shows higher specificity. We show that LGT scenarios carry a strong signal about the position of the root of the species tree and could be used to identify the direction of evolutionary time on the species tree. We use Prunier on a biological dataset of 23 universal proteins and discuss their suitability for inferring the tree of life.Conclusions: The ability of Prunier to take into account branch support in the process of reconciliation allows a gain in complexity, in comparison to EEEP, and in accuracy in comparison to RIATA-HGT. Prunier's greedy algorithm proposes a single scenario of LGT for a gene family, but its quality always compares to the best solutions provided by the other algorithms. When the root position is uncertain in the species tree, Prunier is able to infer a scenario per root at a limited additional computational cost and can easily run on large datasets.Prunier is implemented in C++, using the Bio++ library and the phylogeny program Treefinder. It is available at: http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/software/prunier. © 2010 Abby et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd." 9 Hyun Jung Park, Guohua Jin and Luay Nakhleh. Bootstrap-based Support of HGT Inferred by Maximum Parsimony. In BMCEB, Vol. 10:131, 2010. Keywords: bootstrap, explicit network, from sequences, lateral gene transfer, parsimony, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program Nepal, reconstruction. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-131.         Toggle abstract "Background. Maximum parsimony is one of the most commonly used criteria for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Recently, Nakhleh and co-workers extended this criterion to enable reconstruction of phylogenetic networks, and demonstrated its application to detecting reticulate evolutionary relationships. However, one of the major problems with this extension has been that it favors more complex evolutionary relationships over simpler ones, thus having the potential for overestimating the amount of reticulation in the data. An ad hoc solution to this problem that has been used entails inspecting the improvement in the parsimony length as more reticulation events are added to the model, and stopping when the improvement is below a certain threshold. Results. In this paper, we address this problem in a more systematic way, by proposing a nonparametric bootstrap-based measure of support of inferred reticulation events, and using it to determine the number of those events, as well as their placements. A number of samples is generated from the given sequence alignment, and reticulation events are inferred based on each sample. Finally, the support of each reticulation event is quantified based on the inferences made over all samples. Conclusions. We have implemented our method in the NEPAL software tool (available publicly at http://bioinfo.cs.rice.edu/), and studied its performance on both biological and simulated data sets. While our studies show very promising results, they also highlight issues that are inherently challenging when applying the maximum parsimony criterion to detect reticulate evolution. © 2010 Park et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd." 10 Changiz Eslahchi, Mahnaz Habibi, Reza Hassanzadeh and Ehsan Mottaghi. MC-Net: a method for the construction of phylogenetic networks based on the Monte-Carlo method. In BMCEB, Vol. 10:254, 2010. Keywords: abstract network, circular split system, from distances, heuristic, phylogenetic network, Program MC-Net, Program SplitsTree, software, split, split network. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-10-254.         Toggle abstract "Background. A phylogenetic network is a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allows the representation of conflicting signals or alternative evolutionary histories in a single diagram. There are several methods for constructing these networks. Some of these methods are based on distances among taxa. In practice, the methods which are based on distance perform faster in comparison with other methods. The Neighbor-Net (N-Net) is a distance-based method. The N-Net produces a circular ordering from a distance matrix, then constructs a collection of weighted splits using circular ordering. The SplitsTree which is a program using these weighted splits makes a phylogenetic network. In general, finding an optimal circular ordering is an NP-hard problem. The N-Net is a heuristic algorithm to find the optimal circular ordering which is based on neighbor-joining algorithm. Results. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm to find an optimal circular ordering based on the Monte-Carlo method, called MC-Net algorithm. In order to show that MC-Net performs better than N-Net, we apply both algorithms on different data sets. Then we draw phylogenetic networks corresponding to outputs of these algorithms using SplitsTree and compare the results. Conclusions. We find that the circular ordering produced by the MC-Net is closer to optimal circular ordering than the N-Net. Furthermore, the networks corresponding to outputs of MC-Net made by SplitsTree are simpler than N-Net. © 2010 Eslahchi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd." 11 Pawel Górecki. H-trees: a model of evolutionary scenario with horizontal gene transfer. In Fundamenta Informaticae, Vol. 103:105-128, 2010. Keywords: duplication, lateral gene transfer, loss, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, uniqueness.         12 Gabriel Cardona, Mercè Llabrés, Francesc Rosselló and Gabriel Valiente. Path lengths in tree-child time consistent hybridization networks. In Information Sciences, Vol. 180(3):366-383, 2010. Keywords: distance between networks, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, time consistent network, tree-child network. Note: http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.0087?context=cs.CE.         Toggle abstract "Hybridization networks are representations of evolutionary histories that allow for the inclusion of reticulate events like recombinations, hybridizations, or lateral gene transfers. The recent growth in the number of hybridization network reconstruction algorithms has led to an increasing interest in the definition of metrics for their comparison that can be used to assess the accuracy or robustness of these methods. In this paper we establish some basic results that make it possible the generalization to tree-child time consistent (TCTC) hybridization networks of some of the oldest known metrics for phylogenetic trees: those based on the comparison of the vectors of path lengths between leaves. More specifically, we associate to each hybridization network a suitably defined vector of 'splitted' path lengths between its leaves, and we prove that if two TCTC hybridization networks have the same such vectors, then they must be isomorphic. Thus, comparing these vectors by means of a metric for real-valued vectors defines a metric for TCTC hybridization networks. We also consider the case of fully resolved hybridization networks, where we prove that simpler, 'non-splitted' vectors can be used. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved." 13 Leo van Iersel, Charles Semple and Mike Steel. Locating a tree in a phylogenetic network. In IPL, Vol. 110(23), 2010. Keywords: cluster containment, explicit network, from network, level k phylogenetic network, normal network, NP complete, phylogenetic network, polynomial, regular network, time consistent network, tree containment, tree sibling network, tree-child network. Note: http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.3122.         Toggle abstract "Phylogenetic trees and networks are leaf-labelled graphs that are used to describe evolutionary histories of species. The Tree Containment problem asks whether a given phylogenetic tree is embedded in a given phylogenetic network. Given a phylogenetic network and a cluster of species, the Cluster Containment problem asks whether the given cluster is a cluster of some phylogenetic tree embedded in the network. Both problems are known to be NP-complete in general. In this article, we consider the restriction of these problems to several well-studied classes of phylogenetic networks. We show that Tree Containment is polynomial-time solvable for normal networks, for binary tree-child networks, and for level-k networks. On the other hand, we show that, even for tree-sibling, time-consistent, regular networks, both Tree Containment and Cluster Containment remain NP-complete. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved." 14 Johannes Fischer and Daniel H. Huson. New Common Ancestor Problems in Trees and Directed Acyclic Graphs. In IPL, Vol. 110(8-9):331-335, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, phylogenetic network, polynomial. Note: http://www-ab.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/people/fischer/lsa.pdf.         Toggle abstract "We derive a new generalization of lowest common ancestors (LCAs) in dags, called the lowest single common ancestor (LSCA). We show how to preprocess a static dag in linear time such that subsequent LSCA-queries can be answered in constant time. The size is linear in the number of nodes. We also consider a "fuzzy" variant of LSCA that allows to compute a node that is only an LSCA of a given percentage of the query nodes. The space and construction time of our scheme for fuzzy LSCAs is linear, whereas the query time has a sub-logarithmic slow-down. This "fuzzy" algorithm is also applicable to LCAs in trees, with the same complexities. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved." 15 Sagi Snir and Edward Trifonov. A Novel Technique for Detecting Putative Horizontal Gene Transfer in the Sequence Space. In JCB, Vol. 17(11):1535-1548, 2010. Keywords: from sequences, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction. Note: http://research.haifa.ac.il/~ssagi/published%20papers/JCB-HGT.pdf.         Toggle abstract "Horizontal transfer (HT) is the event of a DNA sequence being transferred between species not by inheritance. This phenomenon violates the tree-like evolution of the species under study turning the trees into networks. At the sequence level, HT offers basic characteristics that enable not only clear identification and distinguishing from other sequence similarity cases but also the possibility of dating the events. We developed a novel, self-contained technique to identify relatively recent horizontal transfer elements (HTEs) in the sequences. Appropriate formalism allows one to obtain confidence values for the events detected. The technique does not rely on such problematic prerequisites as reliable phylogeny and/or statistically justified pairwise sequence alignment. In conjunction with the unique properties of HT, it gives rise to a two-level sequence similarity algorithm that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored. From evolutionary perspective, the novelty of the work is in the combination of small scale and large scale mutational events. The technique is employed on both simulated and real biological data. The simulation results show high capability of discriminating between HT and conserved regions. On the biological data, the method detected documented HTEs along with their exact locations in the recipient genomes. Supplementary Material is available online at www.libertonline.com/cmb. Copyright 2010, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc." 16 Fumei Lam, Ryan Tarpine and Sorin Istrail. The Imperfect Ancestral Recombination Graph Reconstruction Problem: Upper Bounds for Recombination and Homoplasy. In JCB, Vol. 17(6), 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from sequences, heuristic, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction. Note: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sorin/pdfs/Lam%20the%20imperfect.pdf.         17 Frederick A. Matsen. ConstNJ: an algorithm to reconstruct sets of phylogenetic trees satisfying pairwise topological constraints. In JCB, Vol. 17(6):799-818, 2010. Keywords: from distances, Program constNJ, reconstruction. Note: http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.1598v2.         Toggle abstract "This article introduces constNJ (constrained neighbor-joining), an algorithm for phylogenetic reconstruction of sets of trees with constrained pairwise rooted subtree-prune-regraft (rSPR) distance. We are motivated by the problem of constructing sets of trees that must fit into a recombination, hybridization, or similar network. Rather than first finding a set of trees that are optimal according to a phylogenetic criterion (e.g., likelihood or parsimony) and then attempting to fit them into a network, constNJ estimates the trees while enforcing specified rSPR distance constraints. The primary input for constNJ is a collection of distance matrices derived from sequence blocks which are assumed to have evolved in a tree-like manner, such as blocks of an alignment which do not contain any recombination breakpoints. The other input is a set of rSPR constraint inequalities for any set of pairs of trees. constNJ is consistent and a strict generalization of the neighbor-joining algorithm; it uses the new notion of maximum agreement partitions (MAPs) to assure that the resulting trees satisfy the given rSPR distance constraints. Copyright 2010, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc." 18 Simone Linz, Charles Semple and Tanja Stadler. Analyzing and reconstructing reticulation networks under timing constraints. In JOMB, Vol. 61(5):715-737, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from rooted trees, hybridization, lateral gene transfer, NP complete, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, time consistent network. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00285-009-0319-y..         Toggle abstract "Reticulation networks are now frequently used to model the history of life for various groups of species whose evolutionary past is likely to include reticulation events such as horizontal gene transfer or hybridization. However, the reconstructed networks are rarely guaranteed to be temporal. If a reticulation network is temporal, then it satisfies the two biologically motivated timing constraints of instantaneously occurring reticulation events and successively occurring speciation events. On the other hand, if a reticulation network is not temporal, it is always possible to make it temporal by adding a number of additional unsampled or extinct taxa. In the first half of the paper, we show that deciding whether a given number of additional taxa is sufficient to transform a non-temporal reticulation network into a temporal one is an NP-complete problem. As one is often given a set of gene trees instead of a network in the context of hybridization, this motivates the second half of the paper which provides an algorithm, called TemporalHybrid, for reconstructing a temporal hybridization network that simultaneously explains the ancestral history of two trees or indicates that no such network exists. We further derive two methods to decide whether or not a temporal hybridization network exists for two given trees and illustrate one of the methods on a grass data set. © 2009 The Author(s)." 19 Jaroslaw Byrka, Pawel Gawrychowski, Katharina Huber and Steven Kelk. Worst-case optimal approximation algorithms for maximizing triplet consistency within phylogenetic networks. In Journal of Discrete Algorithms, Vol. 8(1):65-75, 2010. Keywords: approximation, explicit network, from triplets, galled tree, level k phylogenetic network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction. Note: http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3258.         Toggle abstract "The study of phylogenetic networks is of great interest to computational evolutionary biology and numerous different types of such structures are known. This article addresses the following question concerning rooted versions of phylogenetic networks. What is the maximum value of p ∈ [0, 1] such that for every input set T of rooted triplets, there exists some network N such that at least p | T | of the triplets are consistent with N? We call an algorithm that computes such a network (where p is maximum) worst-case optimal. Here we prove that the set containing all triplets (the full triplet set) in some sense defines p. Moreover, given a network N that obtains a fraction p′ for the full triplet set (for any p′), we show how to efficiently modify N to obtain a fraction ≥ p′ for any given triplet set T. We demonstrate the power of this insight by presenting a worst-case optimal result for level-1 phylogenetic networks improving considerably upon the 5/12 fraction obtained recently by Jansson, Nguyen and Sung. For level-2 phylogenetic networks we show that p ≥ 0.61. We emphasize that, because we are taking | T | as a (trivial) upper bound on the size of an optimal solution for each specific input T, the results in this article do not exclude the existence of approximation algorithms that achieve approximation ratio better than p. Finally, we note that all the results in this article also apply to weighted triplet sets. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved." 20 David A. Morrison. Using data-display networks for exploratory data analysis in phylogenetic studies. In MBE, Vol. 27(5):1044-1057, 2010. Keywords: abstract network, hybridization, NeighborNet, Program SplitsTree, recombination, split decomposition. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msp309.         Toggle abstract "Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is a frequently undervalued part of data analysis in biology. It involves evaluating the characteristics of the data "before" proceeding to the definitive analysis in relation to the scientific question at hand. For phylogenetic analyses, a useful tool for EDA is a data-display network. This type of network is designed to display any character (or tree) conflict in a data set, without prior assumptions about the causes of those conflicts. The conflicts might be caused by 1) methodological issues in data collection or analysis, 2) homoplasy, or 3) horizontal gene flow of some sort. Here, I explore 13 published data sets using splits networks, as examples of using data-display networks for EDA. In each case, I performed an original EDA on the data provided, to highlight the aspects of the resulting network that will be important for an interpretation of the phylogeny. In each case, there is at least one important point (possibly missed by the original authors) that might affect the phylogenetic analysis. I conclude that EDA should play a greater role in phylogenetic analyses than it has done. © 2010 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved." 21 Gianluca Della Vedova, Riccardo Dondi, Tao Jiang, Giulio Pavesi, Yuri Pirola and Lusheng Wang. Beyond evolutionary trees. In Natural Computing, Vol. 9(2):421-435, 2010. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11047-009-9156-6.         Toggle abstract "In Computational Biology, the notion of phylogeny has become synonymous with tree-like evolution. Recent advances in the Life Sciences have suggested that evolution has a much more diverse course. In this paper we will survey some of the models that have been proposed to overcome the limitations of using phylogenies to represent evolutionary histories. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V." 22 Marta Melé, Asif Javed, Marc Pybus, Francesc Calafell, Laxmi Parida, Jaume Bertranpetit and Genographic Consortium. A New Method to Reconstruct Recombination Events at a Genomic Scale. In PLoS Computational Biology, Vol. 6(11):e1001010.1-13, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from sequences, phylogenetic network, phylogeny. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001010.         Toggle abstract "Recombination is one of the main forces shaping genome diversity, but the information it generates is often overlooked. A recombination event creates a junction between two parental sequences that may be transmitted to the subsequent generations. Just like mutations, these junctions carry evidence of the shared past of the sequences. We present the IRiS algorithm, which detects past recombination events from extant sequences and specifies the place of each recombination and which are the recombinants sequences. We have validated and calibrated IRiS for the human genome using coalescent simulations replicating standard human demographic history and a variable recombination rate model, and we have finetuned IRiS parameters to simultaneously optimize for false discovery rate, sensitivity, and accuracy in placing the recombination events in the sequence. Newer recombinations overwrite traces of past ones and our results indicate more recent recombinations are detected by IRiS with greater sensitivity. IRiS analysis of the MS32 region, previously studied using sperm typing, showed good concordance with estimated recombination rates. We also applied IRiS to haplotypes for 18 X-chromosome regions in HapMap Phase 3 populations. Recombination events detected for each individual were recoded as binary allelic states and combined into recotypes. Principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling based on recotypes reproduced the relationships between the eleven HapMap Phase III populations that can be expected from known human population history, thus further validating IRiS. We believe that our new method will contribute to the study of the distribution of recombination events across the genomes and, for the first time, it will allow the use of recombination as genetic marker to study human genetic variation. © 2010 Mele ́ et al." 23 Erik W. Bloomquist and Marc A. Suchard. Unifying Vertical and Nonvertical Evolution: A Stochastic ARG-based Framework. In Systematic Biology, Vol. 59(1):27-41, 2010. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syp076.         24 Alix Boc, Hervé Philippe and Vladimir Makarenkov. Inferring and Validating Horizontal Gene Transfer Events Using Bipartition Dissimilarity. In Systematic Biology, Vol. 59(2):195-211, 2010. Note: http://www.info2.uqam.ca/~makarenv/makarenv/Artcile_SB_2010.pdf.         25 Luay Nakhleh. A Metric on the Space of Reduced Phylogenetic Networks. In TCBB, Vol. 7(2), 2010. Keywords: distance between networks, phylogenetic network, phylogeny. Note: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/tcbb-Metric.pdf.         Toggle abstract "Phylogenetic networks are leaf-labeled, rooted, acyclic, and directed graphs that are used to model reticulate evolutionary histories. Several measures for quantifying the topological dissimilarity between two phylogenetic networks have been devised, each of which was proven to be a metric on certain restricted classes of phylogenetic networks. A biologically motivated class of phylogenetic networks, namely, reduced phylogenetic networks, was recently introduced. None of the existing measures is a metric on the space of reduced phylogenetic networks. In this paper, we provide a metric on the space of reduced phylogenetic networks that is computable in time polynomial in the size of the networks. © 2006 IEEE." 26 Stephen J. Willson. Regular Networks Can Be Uniquely Constructed from Their Trees. In TCBB, Vol. 8(3):785-796, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from rooted trees, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, regular network. Note: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~swillson/RegularNetsFromTrees5.pdf.         Toggle abstract "A rooted acyclic digraph N with labeled leaves displays a tree T when there exists a way to select a unique parent of each hybrid vertex resulting in the tree T. Let Tr(N) denote the set of all trees displayed by the network N. In general, there may be many other networks M, such that Tr(M) = Tr(N). A network is regular if it is isomorphic with its cover digraph. If N is regular and D is a collection of trees displayed by N, this paper studies some procedures to try to reconstruct N given D. If the input is D=Tr(N), one procedure is described, which will reconstruct N. Hence, if N and M are regular networks and Tr(N) = Tr(M), it follows that N = M, proving that a regular network is uniquely determined by its displayed trees. If D is a (usually very much smaller) collection of displayed trees that satisfies certain hypotheses, modifications of the procedure will still reconstruct N given D. © 2011 IEEE."

InProceedings

27 Tetsuo Asano, Jesper Jansson, Kunihiko Sadakane, Ryuhei Uehara and Gabriel Valiente. Faster Computation of the Robinson-Foulds Distance between Phylogenetic Networks. In CPM10, Vol. 6129:190-201 of LNCS, springer, 2010. Keywords: distance between networks, explicit network, level k phylogenetic network, phylogenetic network, polynomial, spread. Note: http://hdl.handle.net/10119/9859, slides available at http://cs.nyu.edu/parida/CPM2010/MainPage_files/18.pdf.         Toggle abstract "The Robinson-Foulds distance, which is the most widely used metric for comparing phylogenetic trees, has recently been generalized to phylogenetic networks. Given two networks N1,N2 with n leaves, m nodes, and e edges, the Robinson-Foulds distance measures the number of clusters of descendant leaves that are not shared by N1 and N2. The fastest known algorithm for computing the Robinson-Foulds distance between those networks runs in O(m(m + e)) time. In this paper, we improve the time complexity to O(n(m+ e)/ log n) for general networks and O(nm/log n) for general networks with bounded degree, and to optimal O(m + e) time for planar phylogenetic networks and boundedlevel phylogenetic networks.We also introduce the natural concept of the minimum spread of a phylogenetic network and show how the running time of our new algorithm depends on this parameter. As an example, we prove that the minimum spread of a level-k phylogenetic network is at most k + 1, which implies that for two level-k phylogenetic networks, our algorithm runs in O((k + 1)(m + e)) time. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010." 28 Hyun Jung Park, Guohua Jin and Luay Nakhleh. Algorithmic strategies for estimating the amount of reticulation from a collection of gene trees. In CSB10, 2010. Keywords: bound, from rooted trees, heuristic, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, SPR distance. Note: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/ParkEtAl-CSB2010.pdf.         29 Yufeng Wu and Jiayin Wang. Fast Computation of the Exact Hybridization Number of Two Phylogenetic Trees. In ISBRA10, Vol. 6053:203-214 of LNCS, springer, 2010. Keywords: agreement forest, explicit network, from rooted trees, hybridization, integer linear programming, minimum number, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program HybridNumber, Program SPRDist, SPR distance. Note: http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~ywu/Papers/ISBRA10WuWang.pdf.         Toggle abstract "Hybridization is a reticulate evolutionary process. An established problem on hybridization is computing the minimum number of hybridization events, called the hybridization number, needed in the evolutionary history of two phylogenetic trees. This problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a new practical method to compute the exact hybridization number. Our approach is based on an integer linear programming formulation. Simulation results on biological and simulated datasets show that our method (as implemented in program SPRDist) is more efficient and robust than an existing method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg." 30 Leo van Iersel, Steven Kelk, Regula Rupp and Daniel H. Huson. Phylogenetic Networks Do not Need to Be Complex: Using Fewer Reticulations to Represent Conflicting Clusters. In ISMB10, Vol. 26(12):i124-i131 of BIO, 2010. Keywords: from clusters, level k phylogenetic network, Program Dendroscope, Program HybridInterleave, Program HybridNumber, reconstruction. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq202, with proofs: http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3082.         Toggle abstract "Phylogenetic trees are widely used to display estimates of how groups of species are 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 datasets (e.g. for different genes), then their clusters are often contradicting. Consequently, the set of all clusters of such a dataset 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 into the freely available Dendroscope software. Contact: l.j.j.v.iersel@gmail.com. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press." 31 Yufeng Wu. Close Lower and Upper Bounds for the Minimum Reticulate Network of Multiple Phylogenetic Trees. In ISMB10, Vol. 26(12):i140-i148 of BIO, 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from rooted trees, hybridization, minimum number, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program PIRN, software. Note: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq198.         Toggle abstract "Motivation: Reticulate network is a model for displaying and quantifying the effects of complex reticulate processes on the evolutionary history of species undergoing reticulate evolution. A central computational problem on reticulate networks is: given a set of phylogenetic trees (each for some region of the genomes), reconstruct the most parsimonious reticulate network (called the minimum reticulate network) that combines the topological information contained in the given trees. This problem is well-known to be NP-hard. Thus, existing approaches for this problem either work with only two input trees or make simplifying topological assumptions. Results: We present novel results on the minimum reticulate network problem. Unlike existing approaches, we address the fully general problem: there is no restriction on the number of trees that are input, and there is no restriction on the form of the allowed reticulate network. We present lower and upper bounds on the minimum number of reticulation events in the minimum reticulate network (and infer an approximately parsimonious reticulate network). A program called PIRN implements these methods, which also outputs a graphical representation of the inferred network. Empirical results on simulated and biological data show that our methods are practical for a wide range of data. More importantly, the lower and upper bounds match for many datasets (especially when the number of trees is small or reticulation level is low), and this allows us to solve the minimum reticulate network problem exactly for these datasets. Availability: A software tool, PIRN, is available for download from the web page: http://www.engr.uconn.edu/ywu. Contact: ywu@engr.uconn.edu. Supplementary information: Supplementary data is available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press." 32 Chris Whidden, Robert G. Beiko and Norbert Zeh. Fast FPT Algorithms for Computing Rooted Agreement Forests: Theory and Experiments. In Proceedings of the ninth International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA'10), Vol. 6049:141-153 of LNCS, springer, 2010. Keywords: agreement forest, explicit network, FPT, from rooted trees, hybridization, minimum number, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program HybridInterleave, reconstruction, SPR distance. Note: https://www.cs.dal.ca/sites/default/files/technical_reports/CS-2010-03.pdf.         Toggle abstract "We improve on earlier FPT algorithms for computing a rooted maximum agreement forest (MAF) or a maximum acyclic agreement forest (MAAF) of a pair of phylogenetic trees. Their sizes give the subtree-prune-and-regraft (SPR) distance and the hybridization number of the trees, respectively. We introduce new branching rules that reduce the running time of the algorithms from O(3 kn) and O(3 kn log n) to O(2.42 kn) and O(2.42 kn log n), respectively. In practice, the speed up may be much more than predicted by the worst-case analysis.We confirm this intuition experimentally by computing MAFs for simulated trees and trees inferred from protein sequence data. We show that our algorithm is orders of magnitude faster and can handle much larger trees and SPR distances than the best previous methods, treeSAT and sprdist. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010."

InBook

33 David A. Morrison. Phylogenetic networks in systematic biology (and elsewhere) In R.M. Mohan editor, Research Advances in Systematic Biology, Global Research Network, Trivandrum, India, 2010. Keywords: abstract network, explicit network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, survey.         34 Luay Nakhleh. Evolutionary phylogenetic networks: models and issues. In L. Heath and N. Ramakrishnan editors, The Problem Solving Handbook for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Springer, 2010. Keywords: phylogenetic network, phylogeny, survey. Note: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~nakhleh/Papers/HeathRamakrishnanBookChapter.pdf.

PhdThesis

35 Philippe Gambette. Méthodes combinatoires de reconstruction de réseaux phylogénétiques. PhD thesis, Université Montpellier 2, France, 2010. Keywords: abstract network, characterization, circular split system, explicit network, FPT, from clusters, from triplets, integer linear programming, level k phylogenetic network, NP complete, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, Program Dendroscope, pyramid, reconstruction, split network, weak hierarchy. Note: http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00608342/en/.         36 Cuong Than. Inference of parsimonious species phylogenies from multi-locus data. PhD thesis, Rice University, U.S.A., 2010. Keywords: explicit network, from sequences, parsimony, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction. Note: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/62177.         37 Binh T. Nguyen. Novel Split-Based Approaches to Computing Phylogenetic Diversity and Planar Split Networks. PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, U.K., 2010. Keywords: abstract network, diversity, from splits, phylogenetic network, phylogeny, reconstruction, split, split network, visualization. Note: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/34218.

Misc

38 Gabriel Cardona, Mercè Llabrés and Francesc Rosselló. A metric for galled networks. 2010. Keywords: distance between networks, explicit network, from network, galled network, phylogenetic network, phylogeny. Note: http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/1009.0652.