Abstract
In the last decade, the use of phylogenetic networks to analyze the evolution of species whose past is likely to include reticulation events, such as horizontal gene transfer or hybridization, has gained popularity among evolutionary biologists. Nevertheless, the evolution of a particular gene can generally be described without reticulation events and therefore be represented by a phylogenetic tree. While this is not in contrast to each other, it places emphasis on the necessity of algorithms that analyze and summarize the tree-like information that is contained in a phylogenetic network. We contribute to the toolbox of such algorithms by investigating the question of whether or not a phylogenetic network embeds a tree twice and give a quadratic-time algorithm to solve this problem for a class of networks that is more general than tree-child networks.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments.
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We thank the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, the New Zealand Marsden Fund, and the 7th European Community Framework Programme for their financial support.
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Cordue, P., Linz, S. & Semple, C. Phylogenetic Networks that Display a Tree Twice. Bull Math Biol 76, 2664–2679 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-014-0032-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-014-0032-x