Universal rooted phylogenetic tree shapes and universal tanglegrams

Ann Clifton, Eva Czabarka, Kevin Liu, Sarah Loeb, Utku Okur, Laszlo Szekely, Kristina Wicke

Published 2023-08-12Version 1

We provide an $\Omega(n\log n) $ lower bound and an $O(n^2)$ upper bound for the smallest size of rooted binary trees (a.k.a. phylogenetic tree shapes), which are universal for rooted binary trees with $n$ leaves, i.e., contain all of them as induced binary subtrees. We explicitly compute the smallest universal trees for $n\leq 11$. We also provide an $\Omega(n^2) $ lower bound and an $O(n^4)$ upper bound for the smallest size of tanglegrams, which are universal for size $n$ tanglegrams, i.e., which contain all of them as induced subtanglegrams. Some of our results generalize to rooted $d$-ary trees and to $d$-ary tanglegrams.