Recombination faults in gene assembly in ciliates modeled using multimatroids

We formally model the process of gene assembly in ciliates on the level of individual genes using the notion of multimatroids introduced by Bouchet. Gene assembly involves heavy splicing and recombination, and it turns out that multimatroids form a suitable abstract model that captures essential features of this process. We use this abstract model to study the effect of faulty recombinations during the gene assembly process.