Figure 6

Theoretical maximum, and observed mean edit path length for random and inferred protein trees of different sizes. Filled circles show the maximum possible most-parsimonious edit path length for trees with n taxa (= n - 3). Filled diamonds indicate the mean edit distance recovered from comparisons between random pairs of trees with up to 15 taxa, with each tree size replicated 500 times. Open diamonds show the mean edit distance recovered for protein trees of size 4 to 100, with the linear best-fit relationship for the points in this range shown (y = 0.080x + 0.108, R² = 0.656).