On the equivalence of two tree mapping measures Original Research Article

Tree-mapping is a method of deducing the evolutionary history of a set of genes, given two seemingly contradictory evolutionary trees for the genes and for the species in which the genes were found. The method is based on the postulation of duplication events which then allow to resolve the contradiction between the trees. To quantify the difficulty of this reconciliation two measures have been introduced in the literature. Mirkin, Muchnik, and Smith (J. Comput. Biol. 2 (4) (1995) 493–508) conjecture that the two measures are in fact equivalent. The present paper proves this conjecture.