Ricerc@Sapienza

In reconstructing the common evolutionary history of hosts and parasites, the current method of choice is the phylogenetic tree reconciliation. In this model, we are given a host tree H, a parasite tree P, and a function σ mapping the leaves of P to the leaves of H and the goal is to find, under some biologically motivated constraints, a reconciliation, that is a function from the vertices of P to the vertices of H that respects σ and allows the identification of biological events such as co-speciation, duplication and host switch.

Phylogenetic tree reconciliation is the approach commonly used to in- vestigate the coevolution of sets of organisms such as hosts and symbionts. Given a phylogenetic tree for each such set, respectively denoted by H and S, together with a mapping ? of the leaves of S to the leaves of H, a reconciliation is a mapping ? of the internal vertices of S to the vertices of H which extends ? with some constraints.