Reconstruction of biogeographic and evolutionary networks using reticulograms.
A reticulogram is a general network capable of representing a reticulate evolutionary structure. It is particularly useful for portraying relationships among organisms that may be related in a nonunique way to their common ancestor - relationships that cannot be represented by a dendrogram or a phylogenetic tree. We propose a new method for constructing reticulograms that represent a given distance matrix. Reticulate evolution applies first to phylogenetic problems; it has been found in nature, for example, in the within-species microevolution of eukaryotes and in lateral gene transfer in bacteria. In this paper, we propose a new method for reconstructing reticulation networks and we develop applications of the reticulate evolution model to ecological biogeographic, population microevolutionary, and hybridization problems. The first example considers a spatially constrained reticulogram representing the postglacial dispersal of freshwater fishes in the Québec peninsula; the reticulogram provides a better model of postglacial dispersal than does a tree model. The second example depicts the morphological similarities among local populations of muskrats in a river valley in Belgium; adding supplementary branches to a tree depicting the river network leads to a better representation of the morphological distances among local populations of muskrats than does a tree structure. A third example involves hybrids between plants of the genus Aphelandra.
Legendre
Pierre
P
Département de sciences biologiques, Université de Montréal, C.P.6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7. Pierre.Legengre@umontreal.ca
Makarenkov
Vladimir
V
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003411:Arvicolinae; D019295:Computational Biology; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005399:Fishes; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010802:Phylogeny; D012984:Software