Quasi-median hulls in Hamming space are Steiner hulls

A Hamming space Λⁿ consists of all sequences of length n over an alphabet Λ and is endowed with the Hamming distance. In particular, any set of aligned DNA sequences of fixed length constitutes a subspace of a Hamming space with respect to mismatch distance. The quasi-median operation returns for any three sequences u,v,w the sequence which in each coordinate attains either the majority coordinate from u,v,w or else (in the case of a tie) the coordinate of the first entry, u; for a subset of Λⁿ the iterative application of this operation stabilizes in its quasi-median hull. We show that for every finite tree interconnecting a given subset X of Λⁿ there exists a shortest realization within Λⁿ for which all interior nodes belong to the quasi-median hull of X. Hence the quasi-median hull serves as a Steiner hull for the Steiner problem in Hamming space.