It is becoming increasingly clear that the evolution of
certain organisms (e.g. plants, viruses, bacteria) is not
always best represented by a binary leaf-labelled tree.
This is due to underlying evolutionary processes
such as horizontal gene transfer, recombination and
hybridization. Phylogenetic networks provide a framework
for exploring and visualizing the complex patterns
that can arise from such processes. In this talk we review
the split decomposition method for phylogenetic network
construction, and discuss some new directions such as
NeighborNet and species networks.
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