Space of Gene/Species Trees Reconciliations and Parsimonious Models

We describe algorithms to study the space of all possible reconciliations between a gene tree and a species tree, that is counting the size of this space, uniformly generate a random reconciliation, and exploring this space in optimal time using combinatorial operators. We also extend these algorithms for optimal and sub-optimal reconciliations according to the three usual combinatorial costs (duplication, loss, and mutation). Applying these algorithms to simulated and real gene family evolutionary scenarios, we observe that the LCA (Last Common Ancestor) based reconciliation is almost always identical to the real one.