Tractability and approximability of maximal strip recovery

Abstract: An essential task in comparative genomics is to decompose two or more genomes into synteny blocks that are segments of chromosomes with similar contents. Given a set of genomic maps each containing the same markers without duplicates, the problem Maximal Strip Recovery (MSR) aims at finding a decomposition of the genomic maps into synteny blocks (strips) of the maximum total length , by deleting the minimum number of markers which are probably noise and ambiguities. In this paper, we present a collection of new or improved FPT and approximation algorithms for MSR and its variants. Our main results include a time FPT algorithm for -gap-MSR-, a time FPT algorithm for both CMSR- and -gap-CMSR-, and a -approximation algorithm for both CMSR- and -gap-CMSR-. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]