A split in phylogenetics

Phylogenetics

In biology, phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups of organisms , which is discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices...

 is a bipartition of a set of taxa

Taxon

|thumb|270px|[[African elephants]] form a widely-accepted taxon, the [[genus]] LoxodontaA taxon is a group of organisms, which a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit. Usually a taxon is given a name and a rank, although neither is a requirement...

, and the smallest unit of information in unrooted phylogenetic tree

Phylogenetic tree

A phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics...

s: each edge of an unrooted phylogenetic tree represents one split, and the tree can be efficiently reconstructed from its set of splits. Moreover, when given several trees, the splits occurring in more than half of these trees give rise to a consensus tree, and the splits occurring in a smaller fraction of the trees generally give rise to a consensus Split Network

Phylogenetic network

A phylogenetic network is any graph used to visualize evolutionary relationships between nucleotide sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, or species . They are employed when reticulate events such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, or gene duplication and loss are...

.