SplitsTree is a popular program for inferring phylogenetic tree

Phylogenetic tree

A phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics...

s or, more generally, phylogenetic network

Phylogenetic network

A phylogenetic network is any graph used to visualize evolutionary relationships between nucleotide sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, or species . They are employed when reticulate events such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, or gene duplication and loss are...

s from various types of data such as a sequence alignment

Sequence alignment

In bioinformatics, a sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA, or protein to identify regions of similarity that may be a consequence of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. Aligned sequences of nucleotide or amino acid residues are...

, a distance matrix

Distance matrix

In mathematics, computer science and graph theory, a distance matrix is a matrix containing the distances, taken pairwise, of a set of points...

 or a set of trees . SplitsTree implements published methods such as split

Split (phylogenetics)

A split in phylogenetics is a bipartition of a set of taxa, and the smallest unit of information in unrooted phylogenetic trees: each edge of an unrooted phylogenetic tree represents one split, and the tree can be efficiently reconstructed from its set of splits...

 decomposition neighbor-net, consensus networks, super networks methods or methods for computing hybridization or simple recombination

Genetic recombination

Genetic recombination is a process by which a molecule of nucleic acid is broken and then joined to a different one. Recombination can occur between similar molecules of DNA, as in homologous recombination, or dissimilar molecules, as in non-homologous end joining. Recombination is a common method...

networks.

External links

• SplitsTree homepage
• List of phylogeny software, hosted at the University of Washington