Slim sets of binary trees

Abstract

A classical problem in phylogenetic tree analysis is to decide whether there is a phylogenetic tree T that contains all information of a given collection P of phylogenetic trees. If the answer is “yes” we say that P is compatible and T displays P . This decision problem is NP-complete even if all input trees are quartets, that is binary trees with exactly four leaves. In this paper, we prove a sufficient condition for a set of binary phylogenetic trees to be compatible. That result is used to give a short and self-contained proof of the known characterization of quartet sets of minimal cardinality which are displayed by a unique phylogenetic tree.