Microsatellite DNA loci or short tandem repeats (STRs) are abundant in eukaryotic genomes and are often used for constructing phylogenetic trees of closely related populations or species. These phylogenetic trees are usually constructed by using some genetic distance measure based on allele frequency data, and there are many distance measures that have been proposed for this purpose. In the pas...

A new bottom-up distance measure for labeled trees, which is based on the largest common forest of the trees and has the threefold advantage of independence of particular edit costs, low complexity, and coverage of ordered and unordered trees, is introduced and related in this paper with other distance measures published in the literature. Algorithms for computing the bottom-up distance in time...

We develop combinatorial methods for computing the rotation distance between binary trees, i.e., equivalently, the flip distance between triangulations of a polygon. As an application, we prove that, for each n, there exist size n trees at distance 2n − O( √ n). If T, T ′ are finite binary rooted trees, one says that T ′ is obtained from T by one rotation if T ′ coincides with T except in the n...