A Practical Algorithm for Ancestral Rearrangement Reconstruction

摘要

Genome rearrangements are a valuable source of information about early evolution, as well as an important factor in speciation processes. Reconstruction of ancestral gene orders on a phylogeny is thus one of the crucial tools contributing to understanding of evolution of genome organization. For most models of evolution, this problem is NP-hard. We have developed a universal method for reconstruction of ancestral gene orders by parsimony (PIVO) using an iterative local optimization procedure. Our method can be applied to different rearrangement models. Combined with a sufficently rich model, such as the double cut and join (DCJ), it can support a mixture of different chromosomal architectures in the same tree. We show that PIVO can outperform previously used steinerization framework and achieves better results on real data than previously published methods.