An Efficient Algorithm for Gene/Species Trees Parsimonious Reconciliation with Losses, Duplications and Transfers

Motivation) Tree reconciliation is an approach that explains the discrepancies between two evolutionary trees by a number of events such as speciations, duplications, transfers and losses. It has important applications in ecology, biogeography and genomics, for instance to decipher relationships between homologous sequences. (Results) We provide a fast and exact reconciliation algorithm according to a parsimony criterion that considers duplication, transfer and loss events. We also present experimental results that give first insights on the conditions under which parsimony is able to accurately infer evolutionary scenarios involving such events. Over all, parsimony performs well under realistic cases, as well as for relatively high duplication and transfer rates. As expected, transfers are in general less accurately recovered than duplications. Availability: www.lirmm.fr/phylariane/