An Exact Solver for the DCJ Median Problem

The "double-cut-and-join" (DCJ) model of genome rearrangement proposed by Yancopoulos et al. uses the single DCJ operation to account for all genome rearrangement events. Given three signed permutations, the DCJ median problem is to find a fourth permutation that minimizes the sum of the pairwise DCJ distances between it and the three others. In this paper, we present a branch-and-bound method that provides accurate solution to the multichromosomal DCJ median problems. We conduct extensive simulations and the results show that the DCJ median solver performs better than other median solvers for most of the test cases. These experiments also suggest that DCJ model is more suitable for real datasets where both reversals and transpositions occur.