A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a spanning tree with specified vertices having large degrees

Let G be a connected simple graph, let X?V (^G) and let f be a mapping from X to the set of integers. When X is an independent set, Frank and Gyárfás, and independently, Kaneko and Yoshimoto gave a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of spanning tree T in G such that d _T (x) for all x ∈ X, where d _T (x) is the degree of x and T. In this paper, we extend this result to the case where the subgraph induced by X has no induced path of order four, and prove that there exists a spanning tree T in G such that d _T (x) ≥ f(x) for all x ∈ X if and only if for any nonempty subset S ? X, |N _G (S) ? S| ? f(S) + 2|S| ? ω _G (S) ≥, where ω _G (S) is the number of components of the subgraph induced by S.