Distinguishing Phylogenetic Networks

Phylogenetic networks are becoming increasingly popular in phylogenetics since they have the ability to describe a wider range of evolutionary events than their tree counterparts. In this paper, we study Markov models on phylogenetic networks and their associated geometry. We restrict our attention to large-cycle networks, networks with a single undirected cycle of length at least four. Using tools from computational algebraic geometry, we show that the semi-directed network topology is generically identifiable for Jukes-Cantor large-cycle network models.