Semple, CharlesBordewich, Magnus2016-04-042016-04-0420061172-8531http://hdl.handle.net/10092/11964Reticulation processes in evolution mean that the ancestral history of certain groups of present-day species is non-tree-like. These processes include hybridization, lateral gene transfer, and recombination. Despite the existence of reticulation, such events are relatively rare and so a fundamental problem for biologists is the following: given a collection of rooted binary phylogenetic trees on sets of species that correctly represent the tree-like evolution of different parts of their genomes, what is the smallest number of "reticulation" vertices in any network that explains the evolution of the species under consideration. It has been previously shown that this problem is NP-hard even when the collection consists of only two rooted binary phylogenetic trees; however, in this paper, we show that it is fixed-parameter tractable.enAll Rights ReservedDiscussion / Working PapersFields of Research::49 - Mathematical sciences::4901 - Applied mathematics::490102 - Biological mathematics