English

Pairwise Rearrangement is Fixed-Parameter Tractable in the Single Cut-and-Join Model

Genomics 2025-05-30 v5 Data Structures and Algorithms Combinatorics

Abstract

Genome rearrangement is a common model for molecular evolution. In this paper, we consider the Pairwise Rearrangement problem, which takes as input two genomes and asks for the number of minimum-length sequences of permissible operations transforming the first genome into the second. In the Single Cut-and-Join model (Bergeron, Medvedev, & Stoye, J. Comput. Biol. 2010), Pairwise Rearrangement is #P\#\textsf{P}-complete (Bailey, et. al., COCOON 2023), which implies that exact sampling is intractable. In order to cope with this intractability, we investigate the parameterized complexity of this problem. We exhibit a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm with respect to the number of components in the adjacency graph that are not cycles of length 22 or paths of length 11. As a consequence, we obtain that Pairwise Rearrangement in the Single Cut-and-Join model is fixed-parameter tractable by distance. Our results suggest that the number of nontrivial components in the adjacency graph serves as the key obstacle for efficient sampling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.01942,
  title  = {Pairwise Rearrangement is Fixed-Parameter Tractable in the Single Cut-and-Join Model},
  author = {Lora Bailey and Heather Smith Blake and Garner Cochran and Nathan Fox and Michael Levet and Reem Mahmoud and Inne Singgih and Grace Stadnyk and Alexander Wiedemann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01942},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Full version of paper that appeared in SWAT 2024; arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.01851

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:36:48.998Z