Reconciliation and local gene tree rearrangement can be of mutual profit

Reconciliation methods compare gene trees and species trees to recover evolutionary events such as duplications, transfers and losses explaining the history and composition of genomes. It is well-known that gene trees inferred from molecular sequences can be partly erroneous due to incorrect sequence alignments as well as phylogenetic reconstruction artifacts such as long branch attraction. In practice, this leads reconciliation methods to overestimate the number of evolutionary events. Several methods have been proposed to circumvent this problem, by collapsing the unsupported edges and then resolving the obtained multifurcating nodes, or by directly rearranging the binary gene trees. Yet these methods have been defined for models of evolution accounting only for duplications and losses, i.e. can not be applied to handle prokaryotic gene families.