Efficient exploration of the space of reconciled gene trees

Gene trees record the combination of gene-level events, such as duplication, transfer and loss, and species-level events, such as speciation and extinction. Gene tree-species tree reconciliation methods model these processes by drawing gene trees into the species tree using a series of gene and species level events. The reconstruction of gene trees based on sequence alone almost always involves choosing between statistically equivalent or weakly distinguishable relationships that could be much better resolved based on a putative species tree. To exploit this potential for accurate reconstruction of gene trees the space of reconciled gene trees must be explored according to a joint model of sequence evolution and gene tree-species tree reconciliation. Here we present amalgamated likelihood estimation (ALE), a probabilistic approach to exhaustively explore all reconciled gene trees that can be amalgamated as a combination of clades observed in a sample of gene trees. We implement the ALE ...