Mauricio Perretto, Heitor Silvério Lopes
Published September 30, 2005
Genet. Mol. Res. 4 (3): 581-589 (2005)

About the Authors
Mauricio Perretto, Heitor Silvério Lopes

Corresponding author
H.S. Lopes
Email: hslopes@cpgei.cefetpr.br

ABSTRACT

We developed a new approach for the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees using ant colony optimization metaheuristics. A tree is constructed using a fully connected graph and the problem is approached similarly to the well-known traveling salesman problem. This methodology was used to develop an algorithm for constructing a phylogenetic tree using a pheromone matrix. Two data sets were tested with the algorithm: complete mitochondrial genomes from mammals and DNA sequences of the p53 gene from several eutherians. This new methodology was found to be superior to other well-known softwares, at least for this data set. These results are very promising and suggest more efforts for further developments.

Key words: Phylogeny, Bioinformatics, Evolutionary computation, Ant colony optimization.