Locating a tree in a phylogenetic network
Abstract
Phylogenetic trees and networks are leaf-labelled graphs that are used to describe evolutionary histories of species. The Tree Containment problem asks whether a given phylogenetic tree is embedded in a given phylogenetic network. Given a phylogenetic network and a cluster of species, the Cluster Containment problem asks whether the given cluster is a cluster of some phylogenetic tree embedded in the network. Both problems are known to be NP-complete in general. In this article, we consider the restriction of these problems to several well-studied classes of phylogenetic networks. We show that Tree Containment is polynomial-time solvable for normal networks, for binary tree-child networks, and for level- networks. On the other hand, we show that, even for tree-sibling, time-consistent, regular networks, both Tree Containment and Cluster Containment remain NP-complete.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1006.3122,
title = {Locating a tree in a phylogenetic network},
author = {Leo van Iersel and Charles Semple and Mike Steel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.3122},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures