arXiv subjects

Gabriella Trucco

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriella Trucco.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

On recognizing graphs representing Persistent Perfect Phylogenies

The Persistent Perfect phylogeny, also known as Dollo-1, has been introduced as a generalization of the well-known perfect phylogenetic model for binary characters to deal with the potential loss of characters. The problem of deciding the existence of a Persistent Perfect phylogeny can be reduced to the one of recognizing a class of bipartite graphs whose nodes are species and characters. Thus an interesting question is solving directly the problem of recognizing such graphs. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for deciding Persistent Perfect phylogeny existence in maximal graphs, where no character's species set is contained within another character's species set. Our solution, that relies only on graph properties, narrows the gap between the linear-time simple algorithm for Perfect Phylogeny and the NP-hardness results for the Dollo-$k$ phylogeny with $k>1$.

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arXiv2025

On Computing the Dollo-1 phylogeny in polynomial time

The Dollo model for reconstructing evolutionary trees from binary characters has been proposed as a generalization of the infinite sites model, also known as the Perfect Phylogeny. In particular, the Dollo model is considered more realistic than the Perfect Phylogeny for inferring the evolution of tumor mutations. In the case of binary matrices, the Dollo-$k$ model requires an evolutionary tree in which each character, corresponding to a column in the input matrix, may change from $0$ to $1$ at most once, and from $1$ to $0$ at most $k$ times throughout the entire tree. Given a binary matrix, the problem of deciding whether there exists a Dollo-$k$ tree compatible with the matrix is NP-complete for any fixed $k \geq 2$, while computing a Dollo-$0$ tree corresponds to the Perfect Phylogeny decision problem, which admits a simple linear-time algorithm. The Dollo-$1$ tree problem corresponds to the Persistent Phylogeny problem, whose computational complexity, albeit under an equivalent formulation, was posed as an open question 20 years ago. We solve this problem by presenting a polynomial-time algorithm for the Persistent Phylogeny problem. Our solution relies on efficiently solving a specific class of binary matrices, represented as bipartite graphs called \emph{skeleton graphs}, or simply skeletons. In these graphs, characters are \emph{maximal}, that is their corresponding sets of species are not related by inclusion.

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arXiv2014

Algorithms for the Constrained Perfect Phylogeny with Persistent Characters

The perfect phylogeny is one of the most used models in different areas of computational biology. In this paper we consider the problem of the Persistent Perfect Phylogeny (referred as P-PP) recently introduced to extend the perfect phylogeny model allowing persistent characters, that is characters can be gained and lost at most once. We define a natural generalization of the P-PP problem obtained by requiring that for some pairs (character, species), neither the species nor any of its ancestors can have the character. In other words, some characters cannot be persistent for some species. This new problem is called Constrained P-PP (CP-PP). Based on a graph formulation of the CP-PP problem, we are able to provide a polynomial time solution for the CP-PP problem for matrices having an empty conflict-graph. In particular we show that all such matrices admit a persistent perfect phylogeny in the unconstrained case. Using this result, we develop a parameterized algorithm for solving the CP-PP problem where the parameter is the number of characters. A preliminary experimental analysis of the algorithm shows that it performs efficiently and it may analyze real haplotype data not conforming to the classical perfect phylogeny model.

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arXiv2012

The Binary Perfect Phylogeny with Persistent characters

The binary perfect phylogeny model is too restrictive to model biological events such as back mutations. In this paper we consider a natural generalization of the model that allows a special type of back mutation. We investigate the problem of reconstructing a near perfect phylogeny over a binary set of characters where characters are persistent: characters can be gained and lost at most once. Based on this notion, we define the problem of the Persistent Perfect Phylogeny (referred as P-PP). We restate the P-PP problem as a special case of the Incomplete Directed Perfect Phylogeny, called Incomplete Perfect Phylogeny with Persistent Completion, (refereed as IP-PP), where the instance is an incomplete binary matrix M having some missing entries, denoted by symbol ?, that must be determined (or completed) as 0 or 1 so that M admits a binary perfect phylogeny. We show that the IP-PP problem can be reduced to a problem over an edge colored graph since the completion of each column of the input matrix can be represented by a graph operation. Based on this graph formulation, we develop an exact algorithm for solving the P-PP problem that is exponential in the number of characters and polynomial in the number of species.

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