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Genome rearrangement is a common model for molecular evolution. In this paper, we consider the Pairwise Rearrangement problem, which takes as input two genomes and asks for the number of minimum-length sequences of permissible operations transforming the first genome into the second. In the Single Cut-and-Join model (Bergeron, Medvedev, & Stoye, J. Comput. Biol. 2010), Pairwise Rearrangement is #P-complete (Bailey, et. al., COCOON 2023), which implies that exact sampling is intractable. In order to cope with this intractability, we investigate the parameterized complexity of this problem. We exhibit a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm with respect to the number of components in the adjacency graph that are not cycles of length 2 or paths of length 1. As a consequence, we obtain that Pairwise Rearrangement in the Single Cut-and-Join model is fixed-parameter tractable by distance. Our results suggest that the number of nontrivial components in the adjacency graph serves as the key obstacle for efficient sampling.
@InProceedings{bailey_et_al:LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.3,
author = {Bailey, Lora and Blake, Heather Smith and Cochran, Garner and Fox, Nathan and Levet, Michael and Mahmoud, Reem and Singgih, Inne and Stadnyk, Grace and Wiedemann, Alexander},
title = {{Pairwise Rearrangement is Fixed-Parameter Tractable in the Single Cut-and-Join Model}},
booktitle = {19th Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory (SWAT 2024)},
pages = {3:1--3:16},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-318-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {294},
editor = {Bodlaender, Hans L.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.3},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-200436},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SWAT.2024.3},
annote = {Keywords: Genome Rearrangement, Phylogenetics, Single Cut-and-Join, Computational Complexity}
}