Supertree algorithms for ancestral divergence dates and nested taxa

Abstract

Motivation: Supertree methods have been often identified as a possible approach to the reconstruction of the ‘Tree of Life’. However, a limitation of such methods is that, typically, they use just leaf-labelled phylogenetic trees to infer the resulting supertree. Results: In this paper, we describe several new supertree algorithms that extend the allowable information that can be used for phylogenetic inference. These algorithms have been recently implemented and we describe here two illustrative applications. Availability: These new algorithms are freely available for application at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/build.pl