BACKGROUND: Reconciliation methods are widely used to explain incongruence between a gene tree and species tree. However, the common approach of inferring maximum parsimony reconciliations (MPRs) relies on user-defined costs for each type of event, which can be difficult to estimate. Prior work has explored the relationship between event costs and maximum parsimony reconciliations in the duplication-loss and duplication-transfer-loss models, but no studies have addressed this relationship in the more complicated duplication-loss-coalescence model.
RESULTS: We provide a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for computing Pareto-optimal reconciliations and recording all events that arise in those reconciliations, along with their frequencies. We apply this method to a case study of 16 fungi to systematically characterize the complexity of MPR space across event costs and identify events supported across this space.
CONCLUSION: This work provides a new framework for studying the relationship between event costs and reconciliations that incorporates both macro-evolutionary events and population effects and is thus broadly applicable across eukaryotic species.
