Spanning trees with many leaves

Let a maximal chain of vertices of degree 2 in a graph G consist of k > 0 vertices. We prove that G has a spanning tree with more than \fracv(G)2k + 4 \frac{{v(G)}}{{2k + 4}} leaves (where υ(G) is the number of vertices of the graph G). We present an infinite series of examples showing that the constant \frac12k + 4 \frac{1}{{2k + 4}} cannot be enlarged. Bibliography: 7 titles.