Genetic Algorithm Based Model for Reticulate Evolution in Molecular Sequences

Mr. Ashok K Dwivedi, Dr. Usha Chouhan 1, Department of Mathematics, Bioinformatics and Computer Applications, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology (MANIT), Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, INDIA. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: Phylogenetic networks are models of the evolution of a set of organism that generalize phylogenetic trees. These models allow the existence of reticulation events such as recombination, hybridization, or horizontal gene transfer. These concepts are modeled as directed acyclic graphs rather than trees. We consider the problem of modeling such reticulate evolution using genetic algorithms. The algorithm has to be designed which incorporate various constrained by directed acyclic graph and the location of reticulate event. The choice of fitness function is also studied, and several possibilities for this purpose are presented and compared. The experimental evolution indicates that the genetic algorithm can satisfactorily recover the underlying evolution model behind the data. A computationally light fitness function seems to provide the best performance. ________________________________________________________________________________________