Spanning trees without adjacent vertices of degree 2

Abstract

Albertson, Berman, Hutchinson, and Thomassen showed in 1990 that there exist highly connected graphs in which every spanning tree contains vertices of degree 2. Using a result of Alon and Wormald, we show that there exists a natural number d such that every graph of minimum degree at least d contains a spanning tree without adjacent vertices of degree 2. Moreover, we prove that every graph with minimum degree at least 3 has a spanning tree without three consecutive vertices of degree 2.