Reticulation (from Latin reticulum ‘net’, diminutive of rete ‘id.’) in phylogenetics is a generic term that refers to processes such as horizontal gene transfer, recombination, hybridisation, which lead to evolutionary relationships that cannot be fully represented as tree structures. Reticulation may also refer to phylogenetic networks, which are diagrams representing non-treelike structures and which generalise the concept of a phylogenetic tree.
In stemmatology, reticulation results when the copying of a manuscript involves contamination between multiple exemplars.
In other languages
DE: Netzstruktur (hardly in use)
FR: réticulation (hardly in use)
IT: reticolazione