A fundamental aspect of understanding molecular evolution is species phylogeny reconstruction. A commonly used approach in this context is to infer it from a collection of gene tress using, for example, a supertree or supermatrix method. Although popular, one of the main drawbacks of such a method is that it can suppress conflict within the gene trees arising from, for example, lateral gene transfer or recombination. Until now, the only known approaches capable of accommodating such conflict have been Z-closure super-networks and Q-imputation super-networks.
In this talk, we introduce the novel Y-inference rule and show that under certain circumstances this inference rule on its own or in combination with one Meacham's inference rules constitute an attractive alternative approach that complements the above list of super-network approaches.
This is joint work with Stefan Gruenewald (AS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, China) and Qiong Wu (University of East Anglia, UK).
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