As the amount of lateral gene transfer in a taxon increase, it becomes more difficult to infer relationships among lineages within the taxon and more difficult to infer species boundaries.
Phylogenetic trees made up of sequences from the same group of species can diverge due to lateral genetic transmission. Tree comparisons can be used to pinpoint the lineages that might have shared genetic information in cases where topological discordance is believed to have resulted from genetic transfer events. A series of subtree prune and regraft (SPR) operations can be used to represent an "edit path" of one or more transfer events, however, determining the best set of operations for this purpose is NP-hard for comparisons between rooted trees and possibly for unrooted trees as well.
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