Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Five surprising properties of parsimoniously colored trees

  • Published:
Bulletin of Mathematical Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Trees with a coloration of their leaves have an induced “length” which forms the basis of the widely used maximum parsimony method for reconstructing evolutionary trees in biology. Here we describe five unexpected properties of this length function, including refinements of earlier results.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Literature

  • Archie, J. W. and J. Felsenstein. 1993. The number of evolutionary steps on random and minimum length trees for random evolutionary data.Theor. Pop. Biol. 43, 52–79.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Bondy, J. A. and U. S. R. Murty. 1976.Graph Theory with Applications. Macmillan, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cavender, J. 1978. Taxonomy with confidence.Math. Biosci. 40, 271–280.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Erdös, P. L. and L. A. Székely. 1992. Evolutionary trees: an integer multicommodity max-flow-min-cut theorm.Adv. appl. Math. 13, 375–389.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Felsenstein, J. 1988. Phylogenies from molecular sequences: inference and reliability.Ann. Rev. Genet. 22, 521–565.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fitch, W. M. 1971. Toward defining the course of evolution: minimum change for a specific tree topology.Syst. Zool. 20, 406–416.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goloboff, P. A. 1991. Homoplasy and choice among cladograms.Cladistics 7, 215–232.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goulden, I. P. and D. M. Jackson. 1983.Combinatorial Enumeration. Wiley, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartigan, J. A. 1973. Minimum mutation fits to a given tree.Biometrics 29, 53–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maddison, W. P. and M. Slatkin. 1991. Null models for the number of evolutionary steps in a character on a phylogenetic tree.Evolution 45, 1184–1197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steel, M. A. 1989. Distributions in bicoloured evolutionary trees. Ph.D. thesis. Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steel, M. A. 1993 Distributions on bicolored binary trees arising from the principle of parsimony.Discrete Appl. Math. 41, 245–261.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

    Mike Steel & Mike Charleston

Authors
  1. Mike Steel
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mike Charleston
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Steel, M., Charleston, M. Five surprising properties of parsimoniously colored trees. Bltn Mathcal Biology 57, 367–375 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02460622

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02460622

Keywords

Search

Navigation