title: Inferring polyploid phylogenies from multiply-labeled gene trees.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Gene trees that arise in the context of reconstructing the evolutionary history of polyploid species are often multiply-labeled, that is, the same leaf label can occur several times in a single tree. This property considerably complicates the task of forming a consensus of a collection of such trees compared to usual phylogenetic trees.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We present a method for computing a consensus tree of multiply-labeled trees. As with the well-known greedy consensus tree approach for phylogenetic trees, our method first breaks the given collection of gene trees into a set of clusters. It then aims to insert these clusters one at a time into a tree, starting with the clusters that are supported by most of the gene trees. As the problem to decide whether a cluster can be inserted into a multiply-labeled tree is computationally hard, we have developed a heuristic method for solving this problem.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We illustrate the applicability of our method using two collections of trees for plants of the genus Silene, that involve several allopolyploids at different levels.
authors.affiliation: School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. martinl@cmp.uea.ac.uk
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lott
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spillner
authors.forename: Katharina T
authors.initials: KT
authors.lastname: Huber
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Petri
authors.forename: Bengt
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Oxelman
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Moulton
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D010802:Phylogeny; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D011123:Polyploidy