Constructing phylogenetic supernetworks based on simulated annealing.

Different partial phylogenetic trees can be derived from different sources of evidence and different methods. One important problem is to summarize these partial phylogenetic trees using a supernetwork. We propose a novel simulated annealing based method called SNSA which uses an optimization function to produce a simple network that still retains a great deal of phylogenetic information. We report the performance of this new method on real and simulated datasets.