A Complex Network Approach to Phylogenetic Trees: From Genes to the Tree of Life

Abstract

The increasing interest during the last century in the study and comprehension of the evolutionary processes that govern biodiversity, as well as the huge expansion that the complex network approach has undergone in the last decade, has motivated us to address the interrelation of both scientific fields. In that sense, the main goal of this thesis is the application of the complex network theory to the inference of evolutionary patterns through the topological characterization of evolutionary tree.