JUNGLES - A NEW SOLUTION TO THE HOST PARASITE PHYLOGENY RECONCILIATION PROBLEM/

The problem of finding least-cost reconstructions of past host/parasit e associations, given the phylogenetic histories of a set of host taxa and of their associated parasites, is known to be complex. I provide in this article a new method of implicitly listing all the potentially optimal solutions to the problem, by considering each hypothesised pa st association individually, in a structure I have termed a Jungle. Th ese structures are demonstrated to enable fast acquisition of globally optimal solutions under general weighting schemes, including minimisa tion of total number of postulated events and maximization of postulat ed cospeciation events. A simple example is given, and the pocket goph er/chewing louse system investigated by Hafner and Nadler [Hafner and Nadler, Nature 332 (1988) 258] is re-examined. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scien ce Inc. All rights reserved.