Improved Recombination Lower Bounds for Haplotype Data

Recombination is an important evolutionary mechanism responsible for the genetic diversity in humans and other organisms. Recently, there has been extensive research on understanding the fine scale variation in recombination rates across the human genome using DNA polymorphism data. A combinatorial approach towards this is to estimate the minimum number of recombination events in any history of the sample. Recently, Myers and Griffiths [30] proposed two measures, Rh and Rs, that give lower bounds on the minimum number of recombination events. In this paper, we provide new and improved methods (both in terms of running time and ability to detect past recombination events) for computing lower bounds on the minimum number of recombination events. Our principal results include: ? We show that computing the lower bound Rh is NPhard using a reduction from the minimum test collection problem [12]. We adapt the greedy algorithm for the set cover problem [24] to give a polynomial time algorithm...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: RECOMB
• Authors: Vineet Bafna, Vikas Bansal
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Lower Bounds, Minimum Number, RECOMB 2005, Recombination Events