title: On a Mirkin-Muchnik-Smith conjecture for comparing molecular phylogenies.
abstract: A conjecture of Mirkin, Muchnik, and Smith is answered affirmatively which connects the inconsistency function, a biologically meaningful similarity/dissimilarity measure for a gene tree and a species tree, to the mutation cost function, a combinatorial measure based on the mapping of trees. A linear-time algorithm for computing the mutation cost function is also derived from the conjecture.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. lxzhang@iss.nus.sg
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005796:Genes; D016014:Linear Models; D008954:Models, Biological; D009154:Mutation; D010802:Phylogeny