Misspecification Strikes: ASTRAL can Mislead in the Presence of Hybridization, even for Nonanomalous Scenarios
Date
2025-03-25
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Abstract
ASTRAL is a powerful and widely used tool for species tree inference, known for its computational speed and robustness under incomplete lineage sorting. The method has often been used as an initial step in species network inference to provide a backbone tree structure upon which hybridization events are later added to such a tree via other methods. However, we show empirically and theoretically, that this methodology can yield flawed results. Specifically, we demonstrate that under the network multispecies coalescent model—including nonanomalous scenarios—ASTRAL can produce a tree that does not correspond to any topology displayed by the true underlying network. This finding highlights the need for caution when using ASTRAL-based inferences in suspected hybridization cases.
Description
This article was originally published in Molecular Biology and Evolution Published by Oxford University Press.. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf049.
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
ASTRAL, model misspecification, phylogenetic networks, network multispecies coalescent
Citation
Dinh, Vu, and Hector Baños. “Misspecification Strikes: ASTRAL Can Mislead in the Presence of Hybridization, Even for Nonanomalous Scenarios.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 42, no. 3 (March 1, 2025): msaf049. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf049.