  Computing supertrees is a central problem in phylogenetics. The supertree
method that is by far the most widely used today was introduced in 1992 and is
called Matrix Representation with Parsimony analysis (MRP). Matrix
Representation using Flipping (MRF)}, which was introduced in 2002, is an
interesting variant of MRP: MRF is arguably more relevant that MRP and various
efficient implementations of MRF have been presented. From a theoretical point
of view, implementing MRF or MRP is solving NP-hard optimization problems. The
aim of this paper is to study the approximability and the fixed-parameter
tractability of the optimization problem corresponding to MRF, namely
Minimum-Flip Supertree. We prove strongly negative results.
