Finding maximal leaf-agreement isomorphic descendent subtrees from phylogenetic trees with different species

Phylogenetic trees are an important tool to help in the understanding of relationships between objects that evolve through time, in particular molecular sequences. In this paper, we consider two descendent subtree-comparison problems on phylogenetic trees. Given a set of k phylogenetic trees whose leaves are drawn from {1,2,…,n} and the leaves for two arbitrary trees are not necessary the same, we first present a linear-time algorithm to final all the maximal leaf-agreement descendent subtrees. Based on this result, we also present a linear-time algorithm to find all the maximal leaf-agreement isomorphic descendent subtrees.