Constructing Phylogenetic Networks based on Trinets

Abstract The motivation of phylogenetic analysis is to discover the evolutionary relationships between species, with the broader aim of understanding the origins of life. Our understanding of the molecular character- istics of species through DNA sequencing permanently changed the approach to understanding the evolution of species. Indeed, the ad- vancement of technology has played a major role in the fast sequencing of DNA as well as the use of computers in solving biological problems in general. These evolutionary relationships are often visualised and represented using a phylogenetic tree. As a natural generalisation of phylogenetic trees, phylogenetic networks are used in biology to rep- resent evolutionary histories that contain reticulate, or non-treelike events such as recombination, hybridisation and horizontal gene trans- fer. The reconstruction of explicit phylogenetic networks from biolog- ical data is currently an active area of phylogenetics research. Here we consider the problem of constructing such networks from trinets, that is, phylogenetic networks on three leaves. More speci�cally, we present the SeqTrinet and TriLoNet methods, which form a supernet- work based approach to constructing level-1 phylogenetic networks directly from multiple sequence alignments.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of East Anglia

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Oldman, James

Language dc:language

en