Networks and journal covers

If you've ever looked at the cover illustrations of phylogenetics journals, either biological or computational, you will have noticed that there are quite a few phylogenetic trees. Sometimes these trees show ancestral polymorphism, but mostly they are uncomplicated dichotomous structures. There are also often various types of biological networks on these covers, such as gene networks and ecological networks. However, there are almost never phylogenetic networks, irrespective of the journal contents.

So, it is with pleasure that we note that Volume 10 Issue 1 of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics illustrates not one but two phylogenetic networks.

The illustration is from the paper by Stefan Grunewald, Andreas Spillner, Sarah Bastkowski, Anja Bogershausen and Vincent Moulton: SuperQ: computing supernetworks from quartets, on pages 151-160.

These are unrooted data-display networks, of course. If we look for evolutionary networks, instead, then we need to go to Volume 23 Issue 5 of Trends in Ecology and Evolution (May 2008). Actually, it is difficult to believe that this was ever intended to be an evolutionary network, because the phylogenetic relationships shown are rather bizarre.