Related papers: Defining binary phylogenetic trees using parsimony…

Phylogenetic (i.e. leaf-labeled) trees play a fundamental role in evolutionary research. A typical problem is to reconstruct such trees from data like DNA alignments (whose columns are often referred to as characters), and a simple…

Estimating phylogenetic trees, which depict the relationships between different species, from aligned sequence data (such as DNA, RNA, or proteins) is one of the main aims of evolutionary biology. However, tree reconstruction criteria like…

Phylogenetic trees play a key role in the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. Typically, they are derived from aligned sequence data (like DNA, RNA, or proteins) by using optimization criteria like, e.g., maximum parsimony (MP).…

One of the main aims of phylogenetics is the reconstruction of the correct evolutionary tree when data concerning the underlying species set are given. These data typically come in the form of DNA, RNA or protein alignments, which consist…

Applying a method to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree from random data provides a way to detect whether that method has an inherent bias towards certain tree `shapes'. For maximum parsimony, applied to a sequence of random 2-state data, each…

Phylogenetic trees are used to model evolution: leaves are labelled to represent contemporary species ("taxa") and interior vertices represent extinct ancestors. Informally, convex characters are measurements on the contemporary species in…

In this article we prove that the distance $d_{\mathrm{MP}}(T_1,T_2) = k$ between two unrooted binary phylogenetic trees $T_1, T_2$ on the same set of taxa can be defined by a character that is convex on one of $T_1, T_2$ and which has at…

In comparison to phylogenetic trees, phylogenetic networks are more suitable to represent complex evolutionary histories of species whose past includes reticulation such as hybridisation or lateral gene transfer. However, the reconstruction…

Phylogenetic networks are often constructed by merging multiple conflicting phylogenetic signals into a directed acyclic graph. It is interesting to explore whether a network constructed in this way induces biologically-relevant…

In evolutionary biology, phylogenetic trees are commonly inferred from a set of characters (partitions) of a collection of biological entities (e.g., species or individuals in a population). Such characters naturally arise from molecular…

Phylogenetic trees are leaf-labelled trees, where the leaves correspond to extant species (taxa), and the internal vertices represent ancestral species. The evolutionary history of a set of species can be explained by more than one…

Maximum parsimony distance is a measure used to quantify the dissimilarity of two unrooted phylogenetic trees. It is NP-hard to compute, and very few positive algorithmic results are known due to its complex combinatorial structure. Here we…

It has remained an open question for some time whether, given a set of not necessarily binary (i.e. "nonbinary") trees T on a set of taxa X, it is possible to determine in time f(r).poly(m) whether there exists a phylogenetic network that…

The so-called binary perfect phylogeny with persistent characters has recently been thoroughly studied in computational biology as it is less restrictive than the well known binary perfect phylogeny. Here, we focus on the notion of (binary)…

A phylogenetic tree shows the evolutionary relationships among species. Internal nodes of the tree represent speciation events and leaf nodes correspond to species. A goal of phylogenetics is to combine such trees into larger trees, called…

Let $\mathcal{T}$ be an unrooted binary tree with $n$ distinctly labelled leaves. Deriving its name from the field of phylogenetics, a convex character on $\mathcal{T}$ is simply a partition of the leaves such that the minimal spanning…

In this paper we investigate an extremal problem on binary phylogenetic trees. Given two such trees $T_1$ and $T_2$, both with leaf-set ${1,2,...,n}$, we are interested in the size of the largest subset $S \subseteq {1,2,...,n}$ of leaves…

Phylogenetic networks generalize phylogenetic trees by representing reticulate evolution. Tree-based networks and their support trees have been extensively studied, but not all networks are tree-based. To measure how far such networks are…

In phylogenetic analysis, for non-molecular data, particularly morphology, parsimony optimization is the most commonly employed approach. In the past and present application of the parsimony principle, extra step numbers have been added…

Phylogenetic networks generalise phylogenetic trees and allow for the accurate representation of the evolutionary history of a set of present-day species whose past includes reticulate events such as hybridisation and lateral gene transfer.…