A Survey of Combinatorial Methods for Phylogenetic Networks

The evolutionary history of a set of species is usually described by a rooted phylogenetic tree. Although it is generally undisputed that bifurcating speciation events and descent with modifications are major forces of evolution, there is a growing belief that reticulate events also have a role to play. Phylogenetic networks provide an alternative to phylogenetic trees and may be more suitable for data sets where evolution involves significant amounts of reticulate events, such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, or recombination. In this article, we give an introduction to the topic of phylogenetic networks, very briefly describing the fundamental concepts and summarizing some of the most important combinatorial methods that are available for their computation.