On a Mirkin-Muchnik-Smith conjecture for comparing molecular phylogenies.

A conjecture of Mirkin, Muchnik, and Smith is answered affirmatively which connects the inconsistency function, a biologically meaningful similarity/dissimilarity measure for a gene tree and a species tree, to the mutation cost function, a combinatorial measure based on the mapping of trees. A linear-time algorithm for computing the mutation cost function is also derived from the conjecture.