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Reconstructing Unrooted Phylogenetic Trees from Symbolic Ternary Metrics

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Abstract

Böcker and Dress (Adv Math 138:105–125, 1998) presented a 1-to-1 correspondence between symbolically dated rooted trees and symbolic ultrametrics. We consider the corresponding problem for unrooted trees. More precisely, given a tree T with leaf set X and a proper vertex coloring of its interior vertices, we can map every triple of three different leaves to the color of its median vertex. We characterize all ternary maps that can be obtained in this way in terms of 4- and 5-point conditions, and we show that the corresponding tree and its coloring can be reconstructed from a ternary map that satisfies those conditions. Further, we give an additional condition that characterizes whether the tree is binary, and we describe an algorithm that reconstructs general trees in a bottom-up fashion.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We thank Peter F. Stadler for suggesting to consider general median graphs and Zeying Xu for some useful comments. This work is supported by the NSFC (11671258) and STCSM (17690740800). YL acknowledges support of Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (No. 2016M601576).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai, 200032, China

    Stefan Grünewald

  2. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Central China Normal University, Luoyu Road 152, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China

    Yangjing Long

  3. Department of Mathematics and MOE-LSC, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Road 800, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Yaokun Wu

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  1. Stefan Grünewald
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  2. Yangjing Long
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  3. Yaokun Wu
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Correspondence to Yangjing Long.

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Grünewald, S., Long, Y. & Wu, Y. Reconstructing Unrooted Phylogenetic Trees from Symbolic Ternary Metrics. Bull Math Biol 80, 1563–1577 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-018-0413-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-018-0413-7

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