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Constructing rooted supertrees using distances

Bulletin of Mathematical Biology volume 66, pages 1755–1783 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Suppose that a family of rooted phylogenetic trees T i with different sets X i of leaves is given. A supertree for the family is a single rooted tree T whose leaf set is the union of all the X i , such that the branching information in T corresponds to the branching information in all the trees T i . This paper proposes a polynomial-time method BUILD-WITH-DISTANCES that makes essential use of distance information provided by the trees T i to construct a rooted tree S 0. When a supertree also containing the distance information exists, then S 0 is a supertree. The supertree S 0 often shows increased resolution over the trees found by methods that utilize only the topology of the input trees. When no supertree exists because the input trees are incompatible, several variants of the method are described which still produce trees with provable properties.

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  1. Department of Mathematics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA

    Stephen J. Willson

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  1. Stephen J. Willson
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Willson, S.J. Constructing rooted supertrees using distances. Bull. Math. Biol. 66, 1755–1783 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bulm.2004.04.006

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bulm.2004.04.006

Keywords

  • Polynomial Time
  • Branch Length
  • Rooted Tree
  • Support Function
  • Threshold Tree