Merging Partially Labelled Trees: Hardness and a Declarative Programming Solution.

Intraspecific studies often make use of haplotype networks instead of gene genealogies to represent the evolution of a set of genes. Cassens et al. proposed one such network reconstruction method, based on the global maximum parsimony principle, which was later recast by the first author of the present work as the problem of finding a minimum common supergraph of a set of t partially labelled trees.

New bounds and tractable instances for the transposition distance.

The problem of sorting by transpositions asks for a sequence of adjacent interval exchanges that sorts a permutation and is of the shortest possible length. The distance of the permutation is defined as the length of such a sequence. Despite the apparently intuitive nature of this problem, introduced in 1995 by Bafna and Pevzner, the complexity of both finding an optimal sequence and computing the distance remains open today.