Balanced Vertices in Trees and a Simpler Algorithm to Compute the Genomic Distance

This paper provides a short and transparent solution for the covering cost of white-grey trees which play a crucial role in the algorithm of Bergeron et al. to compute the rearrangement distance between two multichromosomal genomes in linear time (Theor. Comput. Sci., 410:5300-5316, 2009). In the process it introduces a new center notion for trees, which seems to be interesting on its own.