Establishing the minimality of phylogenetic trees from protein sequences

Abstract

The problem of finding minimal phylogenetic trees for reasonably sized data sets is hampered by the very large amount of computation required. In this note we consider some new techniques developed to enable researchers to analyse such trees on larger data sets. The basic principle involved is to split the problem into a number of smaller problems which can be more easily handled. Much of the work is described in graph theoretic terms, but no deep results of graph theory are called upon.