A representation-theoretic approach to the calculation of evolutionary   distance in bacteria
  In the context of bacteria and models of their evolution under genome rearrangement, we explore a novel application of group representation theory to the inference of evolutionary history. Our contribution is to show, in a very general maximum likelihood setting, how to use elementary matrix algebra to sidestep intractable combinatorial computations and convert the problem into one of eigenvalue estimation amenable to standard numerical approximation techniques. 
Jeremy G Sumner, Peter D Jarvis, Andrew R Francis
q-bio.PE math.GR math.PR math.RT q-bio.QM