Defining Binary Phylogenetic Trees Using Parsimony

Abstract Phylogenetic (i.e., leaf-labeled) trees play a fundamental role in evolutionary research. A typical problem is to reconstruct such from data like DNA alignments (whose columns are often referred as characters), and simple optimization criterion for reconstructions maximum parsimony. It generally assumed that this works well which state changes rare. In the present manuscript, we prove each binary phylogenetic tree T with $$n\ge 20 k$$ n ≥ 20 k leaves uniquely defined by set $$A_k(T)$$ A ( T ) , consists of all characters parsimony score k on . This can be considered promising first step toward showing reconstruction justified when number relatively small.