Pseudo boolean programming for partially ordered genomes

Abstract

Comparing genomes of different species is a crucial problem in comparative genomics. Different measures have been proposed to compare two genomes: number of common intervals, number of adjacencies, number of reversals, etc. These measures are classically used between two totally ordered genomes. However, genetic mapping techniques often give rise to different maps with some unordered genes. Starting from a partial order between genes of a genome, one method to find a total order consists in optimizing a given measure between a linear extension of this partial order and a given total order of a close and well-known genome. However, for most common measures, the problem turns out to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a (0, 1)-linear programming approach to compute a linear extension of one genome that maximizes the number of common intervals (resp. the number of adjacencies) between this linear extension and a given total order. Next, we propose an algorithm to find linear extensions of two partial orders that maximize the number of adjacencies. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.