Algorithms (Mar 2021)

Arc-Completion of 2-Colored Best Match Graphs to Binary-Explainable Best Match Graphs

  • David Schaller,
  • Manuela Geiß,
  • Marc Hellmuth,
  • Peter F. Stadler

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/a14040110
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 4
p. 110

Abstract

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Best match graphs (BMGs) are vertex-colored digraphs that naturally arise in mathematical phylogenetics to formalize the notion of evolutionary closest genes w.r.t. an a priori unknown phylogenetic tree. BMGs are explained by unique least resolved trees. We prove that the property of a rooted, leaf-colored tree to be least resolved for some BMG is preserved by the contraction of inner edges. For the special case of two-colored BMGs, this leads to a characterization of the least resolved trees (LRTs) of binary-explainable trees and a simple, polynomial-time algorithm for the minimum cardinality completion of the arc set of a BMG to reach a BMG that can be explained by a binary tree.

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