Phylogenetic trees defined by at most three characters

Katharina T. Huber, Simone Linz, Vincent Moulton, Charles Semple

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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 sequences or morphological data. Interestingly, it has been known for some time that any binary phylogenetic tree can be (convexly) defined by a set of at most four characters, and that there are binary phylogenetic trees for which three characters are not enough. Thus, it is of interest to characterise those phylogenetic trees that are defined by a set of at most three characters. In this paper, we provide such a characterisation, in particular proving that a binary phylogenetic tree T is defined by a set of at most three characters precisely if T has no internal subtree isomorphic to a certain tree.
Original languageEnglish
Article numberP4.42
JournalElectronic Journal of Combinatorics
Volume31
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Nov 2024

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