Comparison of Tree-Child Phylogenetic Networks

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allow for the representation of nontreelike evolutionary events, like recombination, hybridization, or lateral gene transfer. While much progress has been made to find practical algorithms for reconstructing a phylogenetic network...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Cardona, Gabriel, Rosselló, Francesc, Valiente Feruglio, Gabriel Alejandro|||0000-0001-9194-2703
Format: article
Publication Date:2009
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/7146
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/7146
https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCBB.2007.70270
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Bioinformatics
Genetics
Trees (Graph theory)
Genetic vectors
Bioinformàtica
Biologia computacional
Genètica
Arbres (Grafs, Teoria de)
Vectors genètics
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica::Bioinformàtica
Description
Summary:Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allow for the representation of nontreelike evolutionary events, like recombination, hybridization, or lateral gene transfer. While much progress has been made to find practical algorithms for reconstructing a phylogenetic network from a set of sequences, all attempts to endorse a class of phylogenetic networks (strictly extending the class of phylogenetic trees) with a well-founded distance measure have, to the best of our knowledge and with the only exception of the bipartition distance on regular networks, failed so far. In this paper, we present and study a new meaningful class of phylogenetic networks, called tree-child phylogenetic networks, and we provide an injective representation of these networks as multisets of vectors of natural numbers, their path multiplicity vectors. We then use this representation to define a distance on this class that extends the well-known Robinson-Foulds distance for phylogenetic trees and to give an alignment method for pairs of networks in this class. Simple polynomial algorithms for reconstructing a tree-child phylogenetic network from its path multiplicity vectors, for computing the distance between two tree-child phylogenetic networks and for aligning a pair of tree-child phylogenetic networks, are provided. They have been implemented as a Perl package and a Java applet, which can be found at http://bioinfo.uib.es/~recerca/phylonetworks/mudistance/.