A branching process with coalescence to model random phylogenetic networks (Q6126989)

The authors introduce a biologically natural, mathematically tractable model of random phylogenetic network to describe evolution in the presence of hybridization. One of the features of this model is that the hybridization rate of the lineages correlates negatively with their phylogenetic distance. Characterizations are given for quantities of biological interest that make them straightforward to compute in practice. It is shown that the appropriately rescaled network, seen as a metric space, converges to the Brownian continuum random tree, and that the uniformly rooted network has a local weak limit, which is described explicitly.