Construction of Gene and Species Trees from Sequence Data incl. Orthologs, Paralogs, and Xenologs

Abstract: Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged after a speciation) is crucial and lies at the heart of many genomic studies. However, existing methods that rely only on 1:1 orthologs to infer species trees are strongly restricted to a small set of allowed genes that provide information about the species tree. The use of larger gene sets that consist in addition of non-orthologous genes (e.g. so-called paralogous or xenologous genes) considerably increases the information about the evolutionary history of the respective species. In this work, we introduce a novel method to compute species phylogenies based on sequence data including orthologs, paralogs or even xenologs.