Section: New Software and Platforms

Coala

CO-evolution Assessment by a Likelihood-free Approach

Keywords: Bioinformatics - Evolution

Scientific Description: Despite an increasingly vaster literature on cophylogenetic reconstructions for studying host-parasite associations, understanding the common evolutionary history of such systems remains a problem that is far from being solved. Many of the most used algorithms do the host-parasite reconciliation analysis using an event-based model, where the events include in general (a subset of) cospeciation, duplication, loss, and host-switch. All known event-based methods then assign a cost to each type of event in order to nd a reconstruction of minimum cost. The main problem with this approach is that the cost of the events strongly inuence the reconciliation obtained.

To deal with this problem, we developed an algorithm, called Coala, for estimating the frequency of the events based on an approximate Bayesian computation approach.

Functional Description: Coala stands for “COevolution Assessment by a Likelihood-free Approach”. It is thus a likelihood-free method for the co-phylogeny reconstruction problem which is based on an Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) approach.

• Participants: Beatrice Donati, Blerina Sinaimeri, Catherine Matias, Christian Baudet, Christian Gautier, Marie-France Sagot and Pierluigi Crescenzi

• Contact: Blerina Sinaimeri

• URL: http://coala.gforge.inria.fr/