On the uniqueness of the maximum parsimony tree for data with up to two substitutions: An extension of the classic Buneman theorem in phylogenetics

Abstract

One of the main aims of phylogenetics is the reconstruction of the correct evolutionary tree when data concerning the underlying species set are given. These data typically come in the form of DNA, RNA or protein alignments, which consist of various characters (also often referred to as sites). Often, however, tree reconstruction methods based on criteria like maximum parsimony may fail to provide a unique tree for a given dataset, or, even worse, reconstruct the ‘wrong’ tree (i.e. a tree that differs from the one that generated the data). On the other hand it has long been known that if the alignment consists of all the characters that correspond to edges of a particular tree, i.e. they all require exactly k=1 substitution to be realized on that tree, then this tree will be recovered by maximum parsimony methods. This is based on Buneman’s theorem in mathematical phylogenetics. It is the goal of the present manuscript to extend this classic result as follows: We prove that if an alignment consists of all characters that require exactly k=2 substitutions on a particular tree, this tree will always be the unique maximum parsimony tree (and we also show that this can be generalized to characters which require at most k=2 substitutions). In particular, this also proves a conjecture based on a recently published observation by Goloboff et al. affirmatively for the special case of k=2.