Constructing Phylogenetic Supernetworks from Quartets

In phylogenetics it is common practice to summarize collections of partial phylogenetic trees in the form of supertrees. Recently it has been proposed to construct phylogenetic supernetworks as an alternative to supertrees as these allow the representation of conflicting information in the trees, information that may not be representable in a single tree. Here we introduce SuperQ, a new method for constructing such supernetworks. It works by breaking the input trees into quartet trees, and stitching together the resulting set to form a network. The stitching process is performed using an adaptation of the QNet method for phylogenetic network reconstruction. In addition to presenting the new method, we illustrate the applicability of SuperQ to three data sets and discuss future directions for testing and development.