Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a well-known problem in molecular evolution. The problem presented in this study is inspired by sequence reconstruction, but instead of leaf-associated sequences we consider only their lengths. We call this problem ancestral gene length reconstruction. It is a problem of finding an optimal labeling which minimizes the total length's sum of the edges, where b...

It is often impossible to sequence all descendent genomes to reconstruct an ancestral genome. In addition, more genomes do not necessarily give a higher accuracy for the reconstruction of ancestral character states. These facts lead to studying the genome selection for reconstruction problem. In this work, two greedy algorithms for this problem are proposed and tested on computer simulation dat...

Ancestral sequence reconstruction is essential to a variety of evolutionary studies. Here, we present the FastML web server, a user-friendly tool for the reconstruction of ancestral sequences. FastML implements various novel features that differentiate it from existing tools: (i) FastML uses an indel-coding method, in which each gap, possibly spanning multiples sites, is coded as binary data. F...

Accurate and efficient inference in evolutionary trees is a central problem in computational biology. While classical treatments have made unrealistic site independence assumptions, ignoring insertions and deletions, realistic approaches require tracking insertions and deletions along the phylogenetic tree—a challenging and unsolved computational problem. We propose a new ancestry resampling pr...

Hypotheses about the functions of ancient proteins and the effects of historical mutations on them are often tested using ancestral protein reconstruction (APR)-phylogenetic inference of ancestral sequences followed by synthesis and experimental characterization. Usually, some sequence sites are ambiguously reconstructed, with two or more statistically plausible states. The extent to which the ...