Recombination plays an important role in creating genetic diversity within species, and inferring past recombination events is central to many problems in genetics. Given a set M of sampled sequences, finding an evolutionary history for M with the minimum number of recombination events is a computationally very challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel branch and bound algorithm for tackling that problem. Our method is shown to be far more efficient than the only preexisting exact method, described in [1]. Our software implementing the algorithm discussed in this paper is publicly available.
Rune B. Lyngsø, Yun S. Song, Jotun Hein