The Génolevures Consortium 1 Our knowledge of yeast genomes remains largely dominated by the extensive studies on Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the consequences of its ancestral duplication, leaving the evolution of the entire class of hemiascomycetes only partly explored. We concentrate here on five species of Saccharomycetaceae, a large subdivision of hemiascomycetes, that we call ''protoploid'' because they diverged from the S. cerevisiae lineage prior to its genome duplication. We determined the complete genome sequences of three of these species: Kluyveromyces (Lachancea) thermotolerans and Saccharomyces (Lachancea) kluyveri (two members of the newly described Lachancea clade), and Zygosaccharomyces rouxii. We included in our comparisons the previously available sequences of Kluyveromyces lactis and Ashbya (Eremothecium) gossypii. Despite their broad evolutionary range and significant individual variations in each lineage, the five protoploid Saccharomycetaceae share a core repertoire of approximately 3300 protein families and a high degree of conserved synteny. Synteny blocks were used to define gene orthology and to infer ancestors. Far from representing minimal genomes without redundancy, the five protoploid yeasts contain numerous copies of paralogous genes, either dispersed or in tandem arrays, that, altogether, constitute a third of each genome. Ancient, conserved paralogs as well as novel, lineage-specific paralogs were identified.

Abstract-The Maximum Parsimony problem aims at reconstructing a phylogenetic tree from DNA sequences while minimizing the number of genetic transformations. To solve this NP-complete problem, heuristic methods have been developed, often based on local search. In this article, we focus on the influence of the neighborhood relations. After analyzing the advantages and drawbacks of the well-known NNI, SPR and TBR neighborhoods, we introduce the concept of Progressive Neighborhood which consists in constraining progressively the size of the neighborhood as the search advances. We empirically show that applied to the Maximum Parsimony problem, this progressive neighborhood turns out to be more efficient and robust than the classic neighborhoods using a descent algorithm. Indeed, it allows to find better solutions with a smaller number of iterations or trees evaluated.

In this paper we propose a generic framework for Dynamic Island Models, which can be used as an original approach for the adaptive selection of operators in evolutionary algorithms. Assigning a variation operator to each island, we show that the dynamic regulation of migrations, which takes into account the pertinence of recent migrations, distributes the individuals on the most promising islands, i.e., the most efficient operators, at each stage of the search. The efficiency of this approach is assessed on the One-Max problem by comparing theoretical expected results to those obtained by our dynamic island model. Experiments show that the model provides the expected behavior.

Abstract. The Maximum Parsimony problem aims at reconstructing a phylogenetic tree from DNA, RNA or protein sequences while minimizing the number of evolutionary changes. Much work has been devoted by the research community to solve this NP-complete problem and many algorithms and techniques have been devised in order to find high quality solutions with reasonable computational resources. In this paper we present a memetic algorithm (implemented in the software Hydra) which is based on an integration of an effective local search operator with a specific topological tree crossover operator. We report computational results of Hydra on a set of 12 benchmark instances from the literature and demonstrate its effectiveness with respect to one of the most powerful software (TNT). We also study the behavior of the algorithm with respect to some fundamental ingredients.