Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: Rooted phylogenetic networks are used by biologists to infer and represent complex evolutionary relationships between species that cannot be accurately explained by a phylogenetic tree. Tree-child networks are a particular class of rooted phylogenetic networks that has been extensively investigated in recent years. In this paper, we give a novel characterisation of a tree-child network $\mathcal{R}$ in terms of cherry-picking sequences that are sequences on the leaves of $\mathcal{R}$ and reduce it to a single vertex by repeatedly applying one of two reductions to its leaves. We show that our characterisation extends to unrooted tree-child networks which are mostly unexplored in the literature and, in turn, also offers a new approach to settling the computational complexity of deciding if an unrooted phylogenetic network can be oriented as a rooted tree-child network.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Döcker, Janosch, Linz, Simone
Institution: University of Auckland
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Marsden Fund
OpenAlex ID: W4403556627