ALT Talk Title: Phylogenetic network estimation from site patterns using composite likelihood Date: Friday, November 10, 2023. 11am – 12pm Eastern Time (ET) Speaker: Sungsik Kong, University of Wisconsin-Madison Talk Abstract: While phylogenies have been essential in understanding how species evolve, they do not adequately describe some evolutionary processes. For instance, hybridization, a common phenomenon where interbreeding between two species leads to formation of a new species, must be depicted by a phylogenetic network, a structure that modifies a phylogenetic tree by allowing two branches to merge into one, resulting in reticulation. Here, we propose a novel method, PhyNEST (Phylogenetic Network Estimation using SiTe patterns), that estimates level-1 phylogenetic networks directly from sequence alignment. PhyNEST achieves computational efficiency by using composite likelihood as well as accuracy by using the full genomic data to incorporate all sources of variability. To sear