Reconstruction of time-consistent species trees

Abstract

Background: The history of gene families - which are equivalent to event-labeled gene trees - can to some extent be reconstructed from empirically estimated evolutionary event-relations containing pairs of orthologous, paralogous or xenologous genes. The question then arises as whether inferred event-labeled gene trees are "biologically feasible"which is the case if one can find a species tree with which the gene tree can be reconciled in a time-consistent way. Results: In this contribution, we consider event-labeled gene trees that contain speciations, duplications as well as horizontal gene transfer (HGT) and we assume that the species tree is unknown. Although many problems become NP-hard as soon as HGT and time-consistency are involved, we show, in contrast, that the problem of finding a time-consistent species tree for a given event-labeled gene can be solved in polynomial-time. We provide a cubic-time algorithm to decide whether a "time-consistent"species tree for a given event-labeled gene tree exists and, in the affirmative case, to construct the species tree within the same time-complexity.