Compatibility of unrooted phylogenetic trees is FPT

A collection of _T1,_T2,…,_Tk$T_1,T_2,\dots ,T_k$ of unrooted, leaf labelled (phylogenetic) trees, all with different leaf sets, is said to be compatible   if there exists a tree T$T$ such that each tree _Ti$T_i$ can be obtained from T$T$ by deleting leaves and contracting edges. Determining compatibility is NP-hard, and the fastest algorithm to date has worst case complexity of around Ω(n^k)$\mathrm{\Omega }(n^k)$ time, n$n$ being the number of leaves. Here, we present an O(nf(k))$\mathrm{O}(\mathit{nf}(k))$ algorithm, proving that compatibility of unrooted phylogenetic trees is fixed parameter tractable   (FPT) with respect to the number k$k$ of trees.