The main objects of the investigation presented in this paper are branched-continued-fraction representations of ratios of contiguous hypergeometric series and type II multiple orthogonal polynomials on the step-line with respect to linear functionals or measures whose moments are ratios of products of Pochhammer symbols. This is an interesting case study of the recently found connection between multiple orthogonal polynomials and branched continued fractions that gives a clear example of how this connection leads to considerable advances on both topics. We obtain new results about generating polynomials of lattice paths and total positivity of matrices and give new contributions to the general theory of the connection between multiple orthogonal polynomials and branched continued fractions. We construct new branched continued fractions for ratios of contiguous hypergeometric series. We give conditions for positivity of the coefficients of these branched continued fractions and we show that the ratios of products of Pochhammer symbols are generating polynomials of lattice paths for a special case of the same branched continued fractions. We introduce a family of type II multiple orthogonal polynomials on the step-line associated with those branched continued fractions. We present a formula as terminating hypergeometric series for these polynomials, we study their differential properties, and we explicitly find their recurrence relation coefficients. Finally, we focus the analysis of the multiple orthogonal polynomials to the cases where the corresponding branched-continued-fraction coefficients are all positive. In those cases, the orthogonality conditions can be written using measures on the positive real line involving Meijer G-functions and we obtain results about the location of the zeros and the asymptotic behaviour of the polynomials.

53 pages, 2 figures