Detection of Reticulation Events - a Character Based Method

It is observed that during the evolution of species, reticulation is an important event and is very prevalent in several organisms. However, the analytical tools for the representation of these events are still under development. This is primarily because of the difficulty involved in detecting these reticulation events that have taken place during the evolution using the sequences that are currently available in some form. Since it is not possible to get each sequence starting from the root (beginning of the evolution process), inferring the history has to be based on a few assumptions, which are biologically valid. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which, we feel, is a step in this direction. The algorithm detects the sequences which require reticulation events for their formation and returns the count of such sequences.