Minimum Recombination Histories by Branch and Bound

Recombination plays an important role in creating genetic diversity within species, and inferring past recombination events is central to many problems in genetics. Given a set M of sampled sequences, finding an evolutionary history for M with the minimum number of recombination events is a computationally very challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel branch and bound algorithm for tackling that problem. Our method is shown to be far more efficient than the only preexisting exact method, described in [1]. Our software implementing the algorithm discussed in this paper is publicly available.

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