  Phylogenetic trees are widely used to display estimates of how groups of
species evolved. Each phylogenetic tree can be seen as a collection of
clusters, subgroups of the species that evolved from a common ancestor. When
phylogenetic trees are obtained for several data sets (e.g. for different
genes), then their clusters are often contradicting. Consequently, the set of
all clusters of such a data set cannot be combined into a single phylogenetic
tree. Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that can
be used to display more complex evolutionary histories, including reticulate
events such as hybridizations, recombinations and horizontal gene transfers.
Here we present the new CASS algorithm that can combine any set of clusters
into a phylogenetic network. We show that the networks constructed by CASS are
usually simpler than networks constructed by other available methods. Moreover,
we show that CASS is guaranteed to produce a network with at most two
reticulations per biconnected component, whenever such a network exists. We
have implemented CASS and integrated it in the freely available Dendroscope
software.
