Advances on Genome Duplication Distances

Given a phylogenetic tree involving Whole Genome Duplication events, we contribute to the problem of computing the rearrangement distance on a branch of a tree linking a duplication node d to a speciation node or a leaf s. In the case of a genome G at s containing exactly two copies of each gene, the genome halving problem is to find a perfectly duplicated genome D at d minimizing the rearrangement distance with G. We generalize the existing exact linear-time algorithm for genome halving to the case of a genome G with missing gene copies. In the case of a known ancestral duplicated genome D, we develop a greedy approach for computing the distance between G and D that is shown time-efficient and very accurate for both the rearrangement and DCJ