Let's celebrate our return with one of our anachronistic "papers of the month". My pick this time around is The net of life: reconstructing the microbial phylogenetic network, in Genome Research 15: 954-959, by Kunin et al.
It's an attempt to tackle the problem of reconstructing microbial phylogeny and in particular, to address the issue of horizontal gene transfer. I have to say, phylogeny is not my favourite topic, perhaps because I am surrounded by the kind of microbiologists who think that running a few sequences through Clustal is all it takes. I'm not sure I agree with everything in this paper, but it's a substantial body of work (concluding that HGT, like so many networks is scale-free), has some interesting implications and rather nice graphical methods.
