Leaf-labelled trees are widely used to describe evolutionary relationships, particularly in biology. In this setting, extant species label the leaves of the tree, while the internal vertices correspond to ancestral species. Various techniques exist for reconstructing these evolutionary trees from data, and an important problem is to determine how "far apart" two such reconstructed trees are from each other, or indeed from the true historical tree. To investigate this question requires tree metrics, and these can be induced by operations that rearrange trees locally. Here we investigate three such operations: nearest neighbour interchange (NNI), subtree prune and regraft (SPR), and tree bisection and reconnection (TBR). The SPR operation is of particular interest as it can be used to model biological processes such as horizontal gene transfer and recombination. We count the number of unrooted binary trees one SPR from any given unrooted binary tree, as well as providing new upper and lower bounds for the diameter of the adjacency graph of trees under SPR and TBR. We also show that the problem of computing the minimum number of TBR operations required to transform one tree to another can be reduced to a problem whose size is a function just of the distance between the trees (and not of the size of the two trees), and thereby establish that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable.

Modern cells embody metabolic networks containing thousands of elements and form autocatalytic sets of molecules that produce copies of themselves. How the first self-sustaining metabolic networks arose at life's origin is a major open question. Autocatalytic sets smaller than metabolic networks were proposed as transitory intermediates at the origin of life, but evidence for their role in prebiotic evolution is lacking. Here, we identify reflexively autocatalytic food-generated networks (RAFs)—self-sustaining networks that collectively catalyse all their reactions—embedded within microbial metabolism. RAFs in the metabolism of ancient anaerobic autotrophs that live from H 2 and CO 2 provided with small-molecule catalysts generate acetyl-CoA as well as amino acids and bases, the monomeric components of protein and RNA, but amino acids and bases without organic catalysts do not generate metabolic RAFs. This suggests that RAFs identify attributes of biochemical origins conserved in metabolic networks. RAFs are consistent with an autotrophic origin of metabolism and furthermore indicate that autocatalytic chemical networks preceded proteins and RNA in evolution. RAFs uncover intermediate stages in the emergence of metabolic networks, narrowing the gaps between early Earth chemistry and life.

No abstract

If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the ‘tree of life’ today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as measured by its expected contribution to phylogenetic diversity. Our approach considers all possible scenarios for the set of species that will be extant at some future time, and weights them according to their likelihood under an independent (but not identical) distribution on species extinctions. Although the number of extinction scenarios can typically be very large, we show that there is a simple algorithm that will quickly compute this index. The method is implemented and applied to the prosimian primates as a test case, and the associated species ranking is compared to a related measure (the ‘Shapley index’). We describe indices for rooted and unrooted trees, and a modification that also includes the focal taxon’s probability of extinction and which links two complementary approaches to conserving phylogenetic diversity.

No abstract