Related Concept Videos
Phylogenetic Trees
Phylogenetic Trees
Microbial Phylogeny
Phylogeny
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
The Tree of Life - Bacteria, Archaea, Eukaryotes
You might also read
Related Articles
Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.
Order-Dependent dissimilarity measures on phylogenetic trees.
Bounding the Softwired Parsimony Score of a Phylogenetic Network.
Quantifying the difference between phylogenetic diversity and diversity indices.
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 23, 2026

A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
Phylogenetic networks that display a tree twice.
Paul Cordue1, Simone Linz, Charles Semple
1Biomathematics Research Centre, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, paul.cordue@pg.canterbury.ac.nz.
Phylogenetic networks model complex evolutionary histories. This study introduces an algorithm to detect if a network contains a tree structure twice, aiding evolutionary analysis.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary biology
- Bioinformatics
- Computational phylogenetics
Background:
- Phylogenetic networks are increasingly used to model reticulate evolution (e.g., horizontal gene transfer, hybridization).
- Gene evolution can often be represented by a tree, even within a reticulate species history.
- Analyzing tree-like structures within networks is crucial for understanding evolutionary processes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether a phylogenetic network can embed a tree structure more than once.
- To develop efficient algorithms for identifying such embedded trees within phylogenetic networks.
Main Methods:
- The study focuses on developing and analyzing algorithms for phylogenetic networks.
- A quadratic-time algorithm is presented for a specific class of networks more general than tree-child networks.
- The core problem addressed is detecting duplicate tree embeddings.
Main Results:
- The research provides a method to determine if a phylogenetic network contains a tree structure twice.
- A novel quadratic-time algorithm is introduced for solving this problem.
- The algorithm applies to a broad class of phylogenetic networks.
Conclusions:
- Efficient algorithms are necessary for extracting tree-like information from phylogenetic networks.
- This work contributes a new tool for analyzing the tree-like substructures within complex evolutionary networks.
- The developed algorithm enhances the analysis of evolutionary histories that can be represented by networks.

