A split in

phylogenetics In biology, phylogenetics () is the study of the evolutionary history of life using observable characteristics of organisms (or genes), which is known as phylogenetic inference. It infers the relationship among organisms based on empirical dat ...

is a bipartition of a set of

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; : taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and ...

, and the smallest unit of information in unrooted

phylogenetic tree A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA. In ...

s: each edge of an unrooted phylogenetic tree represents one split, and the tree can be efficiently reconstructed from its set of splits. Moreover, when given several trees, the splits occurring in more than half of these trees give rise to a consensus tree, and the splits occurring in a smaller fraction of the trees generally give rise to a consensus split network. Pairs of splits are ''compatible'' if any of the subsets defined by each split do not overlap.

References

Phylogenetics Trees (data structures) {{genetics-stub

See also

References