6 research outputs found
A Short Note on Undirected Fitch Graphs
The symmetric version of Fitch's xenology relation coincides with class of
complete multipartite graph and thus cannot convey any non-trivial phylogenetic
information
Generalized Fitch Graphs III: Symmetrized Fitch maps and Sets of Symmetric Binary Relations that are explained by Unrooted Edge-labeled Trees
Binary relations derived from labeled rooted trees play an import role in
mathematical biology as formal models of evolutionary relationships. The
(symmetrized) Fitch relation formalizes xenology as the pairs of genes
separated by at least one horizontal transfer event. As a natural
generalization, we consider symmetrized Fitch maps, that is, symmetric maps
that assign a subset of colors to each pair of vertices in
and that can be explained by a tree with edges that are labeled with
subsets of colors in the sense that the color appears in
if and only if appears in a label along the unique path between and
in . We first give an alternative characterization of the monochromatic case
and then give a characterization of symmetrized Fitch maps in terms of
compatibility of a certain set of quartets. We show that recognition of
symmetrized Fitch maps is NP-complete. In the restricted case where
the problem becomes polynomial, since such maps
coincide with class of monochromatic Fitch maps whose graph-representations
form precisely the class of complete multi-partite graphs
Gene Family Histories: Theory and Algorithms
Detailed gene family histories and reconciliations with species trees are a prerequisite for studying associations between genetic and phenotypic innovations. Even though the true evolutionary scenarios are usually unknown, they impose certain constraints on the mathematical structure of data obtained from simple yes/no questions in pairwise comparisons of gene sequences. Recent advances in this field have led to the development of methods for reconstructing (aspects of) the scenarios on the basis of such relation data, which can most naturally be represented by graphs on the set of considered genes.
We provide here novel characterizations of best match graphs (BMGs) which capture the notion of (reciprocal) best hits based on sequence similarities. BMGs provide the basis for the detection of orthologous genes (genes that diverged after a speciation event). There are two main sources of error in pipelines for orthology inference based on BMGs. Firstly, measurement errors in the estimation of best matches from sequence similarity in general lead to violations of the characteristic properties of BMGs. The second issue concerns the reconstruction of the orthology relation from a BMG. We show how to correct estimated BMG to mathematically valid ones and how much information about orthologs is contained in BMGs.
We then discuss implicit methods for horizontal gene transfer (HGT) inference that focus on pairs of genes that have diverged only after the divergence of the two species in which the genes reside. This situation defines the edge set of an undirected graph, the later-divergence-time (LDT) graph. We explore the mathematical structure of LDT graphs and show how much information about all HGT events is contained in such LDT graphs