Perfect Phylogenetic Networks with Recombination

Abstract

The perfect phylogeny problem is a classical problem in evolutionary tree construction. In this paper, we propose a new model called phylogenetic network with recombination that takes recombination events into account. We show that the problem of finding a perfect phylogenetic network with the minimum number of recombination events is NP-hard; we also present an efficient polynomial time algorithm for an interesting restricted version of the problem.