From quartets to phylogenetic trees

Abstract

Constructing phylogenetic (or evolutionary) trees from biological data is a classical problem in biology, and it still is a major challenge today. Most realistic formulations of the problem, which take errors into account, give rise to hard computational problems. In this survey paper we concentrate on quartet based tree reconstruction methods. We briefly describe the general tree reconstruction problem, and discuss the motivation for using quartet based reconstruction. We then turn to the computational complexity of this reconstruction task. Finally, we give a high level description of some algorithms and heuristics for constructing trees from quartets.