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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.11.14.688467

PaNDA: Efficient Optimization of Phylogenetic Diversity in Networks

Holtgrefe, N.·van Iersel, L.·Meuwese, R.·Murakami, Y.·Schestag, J.
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Abstract

Phylogenetic diversity plays an important role in biodiversity, conservation, and evolutionary studies by measuring the diversity of a set of taxa based on their phylogenetic relationships. In phylogenetic trees, a subset of k taxa with maximum phylogenetic diversity can be found by a simple and efficient greedy algorithm. However, this algorithmic tractability is lost when considering phylogenetic networks, which incorporate reticulate evolutionary events such as hybridization and horizontal gene transfer. To address this challenge, we introduce PaNDA (Phylogenetic Network Diversity Algorithms), the first software package and interactive graphical user-interface for exploring, visualizing and maximizing diversity in phylogenetic networks. PaNDA includes a novel algorithm to find a subset of k taxa with maximum diversity, running in polynomial time for networks of bounded scanwidth, a measure of tree-likeness of a network that grows slower than the well-known level measure. This algorithm considers the variant of phylogenetic diversity on networks in which the branch lengths of all paths from the root to the selected taxa contribute towards their diversity. We demonstrate the scalability of this algorithm on simulated networks, successfully analyzing level-15 networks with up to 200 taxa in seconds. We also provide a proof-of-concept analysis using a phylogenetic network on Xiphophorus species, illustrating how the tool can support diversity studies based on real genomic data. The software is easily installable and freely available at https://github.com/nholtgrefe/panda. Additionally, we extend the definition of phylogenetic diversity to semi-directed phylogenetic networks, which are mixed graphs increasingly used in phylogenetic analysis to model uncertainty of the root location. We prove that finding a subset of k taxa with maximum diversity remains NP-hard on semi-directed networks, but do present a polynomial-time algorithm for networks with bounded level.

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Holtgrefe, N., van Iersel, L., Meuwese, R., Murakami, Y., Schestag, J.. 2025-11-17. PaNDA: Efficient Optimization of Phylogenetic Diversity in Networks. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.14.688467

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