Exact-IEBP: A New Technique For Estimating Evolutionary Distances Between Whole Genomes

Evolution operates on whole genomes by operations that change the order and strandedness of genes within the genomes. This type of data presents new opportunities for discoveries about deep evolutionary rearrangement events, provided that suciently accurate methods can be developed to reconstruct evolutionary trees in these models [3, 11, 13, 18]. A necessary component of any such method is the ability to accurately estimate the true evolutionary distance between two genomes, which is the number of rearrangement events that took place in the evolutionary history between them. We improve the technique (IEBP) in [21] with a new method, Exact-IEBP, for estimating the true evolutionary distance between two signed genomes. Our simulation study shows Exact-IEBP is a better estimation of true evolutionary distances. Furthermore, Exact-IEBP produces more accurate trees than IEBP when used with the popular distance-based method, neighbor joining [16]