A framework for representing reticulate evolution (Q1764470)

In biology it is a very important task representing the evolution of the living world. Generally rooted trees are used to display the evolutionary relations. It is well known, however, that the real-world evolution is ``reticulate'' (= non-tree like) as a consequence of ``hybridizations'' and ``horizontal gene transfers''. Therefore acyclic directed graphs (ADG) can be better tools to describe the evolution. This paper starts the systematic study of the usage of ADGs for this purpose. It discusses in details how one can use these objects to analyse evolutionary relationships, displaying more evolutionary trees in one ADG, where hybridizations are represented with vertices of higher in-degree. The paper also recognizes that, since hybridizations are relatively rare events, it is an important requirement to keep the number of vertices of higher in-degree low. A plausible set of definitions is introduced and important statements are proved for them.