Csuros2010

CREATED: 201001261558 Title: Counting along phylogenies: ancestral reconstruction of numerical characters

Steiner tree labeling

• label inner nodes to minimize sum over all edges penalty of changing from c[u] to c[v]
• asymmetric Wagner penalty, computable in $O(nh)$
• standard solution by DP, not obvious how to extend to infinite values

Probabilistic model

• stochastic models for numerical characters
• Markov assumption

Evolution of gene structure

• some eukaryotes have few introns (yeast), some have many (human)
• human genome is “primitive” in term of introns. Most intros are present in last common ancestor of eukaryotes

Evolution of gene counts

• a birth death model, continuous time Markov process (gain rate, loss rate, dup rate)
• distributions of inparalogs and xenologs are well characterized
• how to compute likelihood of a profile?
• Felsenstein’s algorithm doesn’t work. Condition on the number of genes that have surviving modern offspring gives a DP solution, need correction for missing families

Example: gene content evolution in Archaea, COGs for gene families