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Systematic Biology 2007 56(3):445-452; doi:10.1080/10635150701416682
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© 2007 Society of Systematic Biologists

Majority-Rule Supertrees

James A. Cotton1,2 and Mark Wilkinson1

1 Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum London, SW7 5BD, UK

Edited by Mike Steel: Associate Editor


  Abstract

Most supertree methods proposed to date are essentially ad hoc, rather than designed with particular properties in mind. Although the supertree problem remains difficult, one promising avenue is to develop from better understood consensus methods to the more general supertree setting. Here, we generalize the widely used majority-rule consensus method to the supertree setting. The majority-rule consensus tree is the strict consensus of the median trees under the symmetric-difference metric, so we can generalize the consensus method by generalizing this metric to trees with differing leaf sets. There are two different natural generalizations, based on pruning or grafting leaves to produce comparable trees, and these two generalizations produce two different, but related, majority-rule supertree methods.

Keywords: Consensus; phylogeny; symmetric-difference metric; Tree of Life

Received August 25, 2006; Revised October 15, 2006; Accepted January 31, 2007

2 Current Address: Bioinformatics Laboratory, Department of Biology, National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland; E-mail: james.cotton{at}nuim.ie


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