Reconstructing Phylogenetic Networks Using Maximum Parsimony

Phylogenies—the evolutionary histories of groups of organisms—are one of the most widely used tools throughout the life sciences, as well as objects of research within systematics, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, etc. Almost every tool devised to date to reconstruct phylogenies produces trees; yet it is widely understood and accepted that trees oversimplify the evolutionary histories of many groups of organims, most prominently bacteria (because of horizontal gene transfer) and plants (because of hybrid speciation). Various methods and criteria have been introduced for phylogenetic tree reconstruction. Parsimony is one of the most widely used and studied criteria, and various accurate and efficient heuristics for reconstructing trees based on parsimony have been devised. Jotun Hein suggested a straightforward extension of the parsimony criterion to phylogenetic networks. In this paper we formalize this concept, and provide the first experimental study of the quality of parsi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CSB
• Authors: Luay Nakhleh, Guohua Jin, Fengmei Zhao, John M. Mellor-Crummey
• Keywords: Bioinformatics, CSB 2005, Parsimony, Parsimony Criterion, Phylogenetic Networks