Figure 2.

The subtree-prune-and-regraft operator. (a) First a subtree (blue) and its associated node O are detached from the rest of the tree (green). (b) The subtree is then regrafted along into a different branch through its node O. In both (a) and (b), three branches connect to node O. The phylogeny relating sequences at the pruned nodes (blue) and the phylogeny relating sequences at the remaining nodes (green) do not change. Therefore alignments within each of these sequence subsets can remain unchanged from (a) to (b).