This is the first book on phylogenetic supertrees, a recent, but controversial development for inferring evolutionary trees. It provides a comprehensive look at ubertrees, ranging from the methods used to build supertrees to the significance of supertrees to bioinformatic and biological research. Reviews of the many supertree methods are provided and four new techniques, including a Bayesian implementation of supertrees, are described for the first time. The far-reaching impact of supertrees on biological research is highlighted both in general terms and through specific examples from diverse clades such as flowering plants, even-toed ungulates, and primates. The book also critically examines the many outstanding challenges and problem areas for this relatively new field, showing the way for supertree construction in the age of genomics.
From the contents:1: Reviews of existing methods * 2: New supertree methods * 3: Methodological considerations * 4: A critical look at supertrees * 5: Supertrees and their applications * Taxon index * Subject index.
From the reviews: "It provides a very worthwhile introduction to a topic that is receiving a lot of attention among phylogeneticists in the new millennium: how to combine the information contained in multiple phylogenetic trees with partially overlapping sets of taxa. ! this book achieves what it sets out to achieve, which is to provide an overview and evaluation of possible approaches to the construction of supertrees. ! This book does a good job of explaining the arithmetic and the mathematics of supertrees ! ." (David A. Morrison, Systematic Biology, Vol. 55 (3), 2006)