Algorithms for Molecular Biology (Jun 2018)

Locus-aware decomposition of gene trees with respect to polytomous species trees

  • Michał Aleksander Ciach,
  • Anna Muszewska,
  • Paweł Górecki

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13015-018-0128-1
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 1
pp. 1 – 18

Abstract

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Abstract Background Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), a process of acquisition and fixation of foreign genetic material, is an important biological phenomenon. Several approaches to HGT inference have been proposed. However, most of them either rely on approximate, non-phylogenetic methods or on the tree reconciliation, which is computationally intensive and sensitive to parameter values. Results We investigate the locus tree inference problem as a possible alternative that combines the advantages of both approaches. We present several algorithms to solve the problem in the parsimony framework. We introduce a novel tree mapping, which allows us to obtain a heuristic solution to the problems of locus tree inference and duplication classification. Conclusions Our approach allows for faster comparisons of gene and species trees and improves known algorithms for duplication inference in the presence of polytomies in the species trees. We have implemented our algorithms in a software tool available at https://github.com/mciach/LocusTreeInference.

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