| A phylogeny is the evolutionary history for a set of evolutionarily related species. The development of hereditary trees, or phylogenetic trees, is an important research subject in computational biology. One development approach, motivated by graph theory, constructs a relationship graph based on evolutionary proximity of pairs of species. Associated with this approach is the kth phylogenetic root construction problem: given a relationship graph, construct a phylogenetic tree such that the leaves of the tree correspond to the species and are within distance k if adjacent in the relationship graph. In this thesis, we give a polynomial time algorithm to solve this problem for strictly chordal graphs, a particular subclass of chordal graphs. During the construction of a solution, we examine the problem for tree chordal graphs, and establish new properties for strictly chordal graphs. |
