Fernández Otero, NicolásFernández Pena, Anselmo TomásPichel Campos, Juan Carlos2026-04-222026-04-222026-04-06Fernández-Otero, N., Pena, T.F., & Pichel, J.C. (2026) Reconstruction of phylogenetic trees via graph-splitting using quantum computing. Journal of Supercomputing 82(324). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-026-08465-xhttps://hdl.handle.net/10347/46888Quantum computing applies principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition and entanglement, to process information with exponential parallelism. This paradigm offers significant computational advantages over classical methods, particularly for NP-hard problems like phylogenetic tree reconstruction in evolutionary biology. Phylogenetic trees model the evolutionary relationships among species or genes, and their reconstruction is computationally challenging as the number of possible topologies grows exponentially with the number of taxa. To address this, biologists often rely on heuristic methods; however, recent work has shown that recursive graph-cut techniques can achieve high accuracy in phylogenetic inference, though at high computational cost. In this study, we present a quantum algorithm based on the normalized cut ( ) criterion, enabling efficient recursive graph partitioning. Implemented using Quantum Annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), demonstrating promising results on real quantum hardware for complex bioinformatics tasks.engThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Attribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Phylogenetic treeQuantum annealingQuantum approximate optimization algorithmMincutNcutjournal article10.1007/s11227-026-08465-x1573-0484open access