Hunting for Functionally Analogous Genes

M. T. Hallett, J. Lagergren

To appear at Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS2000), New Delhi, India, December 13-15 2000


Abstract

Abstract: Evidence indicates that members of many gene families in the genome of an organism tend to have homologues both within their own genome and in the genomes of other organisms. Amongst these homologues, typically only one or a few per genome perform an analogous function in their genome. Finding subsets of these genes which show evidence of performing a common function is an important first step towards, for instance, the creation of phylogenetic trees, multiple sequence alignments and secondary structure predictions. Given a collection of taxa $P = {P_1, P_2,..., P_k}$ where $P_i$ contains genes ${p_{i1}, p_{i2},..., p_{in_i}}$, we ask to choose one gene from each of the taxa $P_i$ such that these chosen vertices most agree. We de,ne most agreeing in three distinct ways: most tree-like, pairwise closest, and pairwise most similar. We show these problems to be computationally hard from almost every angle via classical, parameterized and approximation complexity theory. However, on the positive side, we give randomized approximation algorithms for the pairwise closest and pairwise most similar variants.


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