Related papers: Counting and sampling gene family evolutionary his…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
Motivation: Millions of genes in the modern species belong to only thousands of `gene families'. A gene family includes instances of the same gene in different species (orthologs) and duplicate genes in the same species (paralogs). Genes…
Molecular phylogeny has focused mainly on improving models for the reconstruction of gene trees based on sequence alignments. Yet, most phylogeneticists seek to reveal the history of species. Although the histories of genes and species are…
Reconstructing the tree of life from molecular sequences is a fundamental problem in computational biology. Modern data sets often contain a large number of genes, which can complicate the reconstruction problem due to the fact that…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
Large scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…
A major problem for inferring species trees from gene trees is that evolutionary processes can sometimes favour gene tree topologies that conflict with an underlying species tree. In the case of incomplete lineage sorting, this phenomenon…
Phylogenetic networks are increasingly used in evolutionary biology to represent the history of species that have undergone reticulate events such as horizontal gene transfer, hybrid speciation and recombination. One of the most fundamental…
Gene tree/species tree reconciliation is a recent decisive progress in phylo-genetic methods, accounting for the possible differences between gene histories and species histories. Reconciliation consists in explaining these differences by…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…
Gene trees are evolutionary trees representing the ancestry of genes sampled from multiple populations. Species trees represent populations of individuals -- each with many genes -- splitting into new populations or species. The coalescent…
In phylogenetic studies, the evolution of molecular sequences is assumed to have taken place along the phylogeny traced by the ancestors of extant species. In the presence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), however, this may not be the case,…
Phylogenetic trees illustrate the evolutionary history of genes and species. In most cases, although genes evolve along with the species they belong to, a species tree and gene tree are not identical, because of evolutionary events at the…
Given a gene tree and a species tree, ancestral configurations represent the combinatorially distinct sets of gene lineages that can reach a given node of the species tree. They have been introduced as a data structure for use in the…
Recently, there has been interest in extending long-known results about the multispecies coalescent tree to other models of gene trees. Results about the gene duplication and loss (GDL) tree have mathematical proofs, including species tree…
Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…
Evolutionary scenarios describing the evolution of a family of genes within a collection of species comprise the mapping of the vertices of a gene tree $T$ to vertices and edges of a species tree $S$. The relative timing of the last common…
Species trees represent the historical divergences of populations or species, while gene trees trace the ancestry of individual gene copies sampled within those populations. In cases involving rapid speciation, gene trees with topologies…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…