2021/12/30 by Joan Carles Pons, Pons, Joan Carles, Tomás M. Coronado +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Mathematics · #Combinatorics (math.CO) #Evolution and Paleontology Studies #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #math.CO #q-bio.PE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.15179
openalex publication_date 2021/12/30 · arxiv created 2022/04/05 · arxiv updated 2022/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Invariants for complicated objects such as those arising in phylogenetics, whether they are invariants as matrices, polynomials, or other mathematical structures, are important tools for distinguishing and working with such objects. In this paper, we generalize a complete polynomial invariant on trees to a class of phylogenetic networks called separable networks, which will include orchard networks. Networks are becoming increasingly important for their ability to represent reticulation events, such as hybridization, in evolutionary history. We provide a function from the space of internally multi-labelled phylogenetic networks, a more generic graph structure than phylogenetic networks where the reticulations are also labelled, to a polynomial ring. We prove that the separability condition allows us to characterize, via the polynomial, the phylogenetic networks with the same number of leaves and same number of reticulations by considering their internally labelled versions. While the invariant for trees is a polynomial in Z[x1,..., xn,y] where n is the number of leaves, the invariant for internally multi-labelled phylogenetic networks is an element of Z[x1,..., xn,lambda1,...,lambdar,y], where r is the number of reticulations in the network. When the networks are considered without leaf labels the number of variables reduces to r+2.