A fundamental problem arising in the evolutionary molecular biology is to discover the locations of gene duplications and multiple gene duplication episodes based on the phylogenetic information. The solutions to the MULTIPLE GENE DUPLICATION problems can provide useful clues to place the gene duplication events onto the locations of a species tree and to expose the multiple gene duplication episodes. In this paper, we study two variations of the MULTIPLE GENE DUPLICATION problems: the EPISODE-CLUSTERING (EC) problem and the MINIMUM EPISODES (ME) problem. For the EC problem, we improve the results of Burleigh et al. with an optimal linear-time algorithm. For the ME problem, on the basis of the algorithm presented by Bansal and Eulenstein, we propose an optimal linear-time algorithm.
A tandem duplication random loss (TDRL) operation duplicates a contiguous segment of genes, followed by the random loss of one copy of each of the duplicated genes. Although the importance of this operation is founded by several recent biological studies, it has been investigated only rarely from a theoretical point of view. Of particular interest are sorting TDRLs which are TDRLs that, when applied to a permutation representing a genome, reduce the distance towards another given permutation. The identification of sorting genome rearrangement operations in general is a key ingredient of many algorithms for reconstructing the evolutionary history of a set of species. In this paper we present methods to compute all sorting TDRLs for two given gene orders. In addition, a closed formula for the number of sorting TDRLs is derived and further properties of sorting TDRLs are investigated. It is also shown that the theoretical findings are useful for identifying unique sorting TDRL scenarios for mitochondrial gene orders.
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