'Lassoing' a phylogenetic tree I: basic properties, shellings, and covers

A classical result, fundamental to evolutionary biology, states that an edge-weighted tree with leaf set , positive edge weights, and no vertices of degree 2 can be uniquely reconstructed from the leaf-to-leaf distances between any two elements of . In biology, corresponds to a set of taxa (e.g. extant species), the tree describes their phylogenetic relationships, the edges correspond to earlier species evolving for a time until splitting in two or more species by some speciation/bifurcation event, and their length corresponds to the genetic change accumulating over that time in such a species. In this paper, we investigate which subsets of suffice to determine ('lasso') the tree from the leaf-to-leaf distances induced by that tree. The question is particularly topical since reliable estimates of genetic distance-even (if not in particular) by modern mass-sequencing methods-are, in general, available only for certain combinations of taxa.