Inferring polyploid phylogenies from multiply-labeled gene trees

BACKGROUND: Gene trees that arise in the context of reconstructing the evolutionary history of polyploid species are often multiply-labeled, that is, the same leaf label can occur several times in a single tree. This property considerably complicates the task of forming a consensus of a collection of such trees compared to usual phylogenetic trees. RESULTS: We present a method for computing a consensus tree of multiply-labeled trees. As with the well-known greedy consensus tree approach for phylogenetic trees, our method first breaks the given collection of gene trees into a set of clusters. It then aims to insert these clusters one at a time into a tree, starting with the clusters that are supported by most of the gene trees. As the problem to decide whether a cluster can be inserted into a multiply-labeled tree is computationally hard, we have developed a heuristic method for solving this problem. CONCLUSION: We illustrate the applicability of our method using two collections of trees for plants of the genus Silene, that involve several allopolyploids at different levels.