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arXiv · 1712.04127

On the existence of a cherry-picking sequence

Janosch Döcker·Simone Linz
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Abstract

Recently, the minimum number of reticulation events that is required to simultaneously embed a collection P of rooted binary phylogenetic trees into a so-called temporal network has been characterized in terms of cherry-picking sequences. Such a sequence is a particular ordering on the leaves of the trees in P. However, it is well-known that not all collections of phylogenetic trees have a cherry-picking sequence. In this paper, we show that the problem of deciding whether or not P has a cherry-picking sequence is NP-complete for when P contains at least eight rooted binary phylogenetic trees. Moreover, we use automata theory to show that the problem can be solved in polynomial time if the number of trees in P and the number of cherries in each such tree are bounded by a constant.

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Janosch Döcker, Simone Linz. 2017-12-12. On the existence of a cherry-picking sequence. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2017.12.005

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