Merging partially labelled trees: hardness and a declarative programming solution

International audienceIntraspecific studies often make use of haplotype networks instead of gene genealogies to represent the evolution of a set of genes. Cassens et al. proposed one such network reconstruction method, based on the global maximum parsimony principle, which was later recast by the first author of the present work as the problem of finding a minimum common supergraph of a set of t partially labelled trees. Although algorithms were proposed for solving the problem on two graphs, the complexity of the general problem remains unknown. In this paper, we show that the corresponding decision problem is NP-complete for t = 3. We then propose a declarative programming approach to solving the problem to optimality in practice, as well as a heuristic approach, both based on the IDP system, and assess the performance of both methods on randomly generated data

Energy landscapes, supergraphs, and "folding funnels" in spin systems

Dynamical connectivity graphs, which describe dynamical transition rates between local energy minima of a system, can be displayed against the background of a disconnectivity graph which represents the energy landscape of the system. The resulting supergraph describes both dynamics and statics of the system in a unified coarse-grained sense. We give examples of the supergraphs for several two dimensional spin and protein-related systems. We demonstrate that disordered ferromagnets have supergraphs akin to those of model proteins whereas spin glasses behave like random sequences of aminoacids which fold badly.Comment: REVTeX, 9 pages, two-column, 13 EPS figures include