Identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13003/15131
Generation of Binary Tree-Child phylogenetic networks
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eISSN: 1553-7358
WOS ID: 000489741800040
Scopus EID: 2-s2.0-85072588228
PMID: 31509525
Embase PUI: L2003470944
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2019-09Document type
research articleCitation
Cardona G, Pons Mayol JC, Scornavacca C. Generation of Binary Tree-Child phylogenetic networks. PLoS Comput Biol. 2019 Sep;15(9):e1007347.Abstract
Phylogenetic networks generalize phylogenetic trees by allowing the modelization of events of reticulate evolution. Among the different kinds of phylogenetic networks that have been proposed in the literature, the subclass of binary tree-child networks is one of the most studied ones. However, very little is known about the combinatorial structure of these networks. In this paper we address the problem of generating all possible binary tree-child (BTC) networks with a given number of leaves in an efficient way via reduction/augmentation operations that extend and generalize analogous operations for phylogenetic trees, and are biologically relevant. Since our solution is recursive, this also provides us with a recurrence relation giving an upper bound on the number of such networks. We also show how the operations introduced in this paper can be employed to extend the evolutive history of a set of sequences, represented by a BTC network, to include a new sequence. An implementation in python of the algorithms described in this paper, along with some computational experiments, can be downloaded from https://github.com/bielcardona/TCGenerators.