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A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
Tanglegrams for rooted phylogenetic trees and networks
Celine Scornavacca1, Franziska Zickmann, Daniel H Huson
1Center for Bioinformatics (ZBIT), Tübingen University, Sand 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. scornava@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
|June 21, 2011
Summary
This study defines tanglegrams for phylogenetic networks, enabling comparisons of evolutionary histories. The new NN-tanglegram method is available in Dendroscope 3 for analyzing complex biological datasets.
Area of Science:
- Systematic biology
- Computational evolutionary biology
- Phylogenetics
Background:
- Comparing phylogenetic trees is crucial for multi-gene analyses and cospeciation studies.
- Tanglegrams visualize relationships between two phylogenetic trees using auxiliary lines.
- Rooted phylogenetic networks are increasingly used to represent complex evolutionary events like gene transfer and hybridization.
Purpose of the Study:
- To formally define tanglegrams for rooted phylogenetic networks.
- To develop a heuristic method for computing tanglegrams for phylogenetic networks.
- To provide a tool for analyzing evolutionary relationships represented by networks.
Main Methods:
- Formal definition of tanglegrams for rooted phylogenetic networks.
- Development of the NN-tanglegram heuristic method.
- Implementation in Dendroscope 3 software.
Main Results:
- The first formal definition of tanglegrams for rooted phylogenetic networks is presented.
- The NN-tanglegram method is introduced as a heuristic approach for computing these tanglegrams.
- The method's performance is compared to existing tree tanglegram algorithms using real biological datasets.
Conclusions:
- The NN-tanglegram method provides a novel approach for visualizing and comparing evolutionary histories represented by phylogenetic networks.
- The algorithm is flexible, not requiring bifurcating or bicombining trees/networks or identical taxon sets.
- The implementation in Dendroscope 3 ensures broad usability for researchers in systematic biology.
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