Gene trees and species trees: The gene-duplication problem is fixed-parameter tractable

Abstract

Gene Duplication is the problem of computing an optimal species tree for a given set of gene trees under the Gene-Duplication Model (first introduced by Goodman et al.). The problem is known to be NP-complete. We give a fixed-parameter-tractable algorithm solving the problem parameterized by the number of gene duplications necessary to rectify the gene trees with respect to the species tree.