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The P4 is the induced path of four vertices. The gem consists of a P4 with an additional universal vertex being completely adjacent to the P4, and the co-gem is its complement graph. Gem- and co-gem-free graphs generalize the popular class of cographs (i. e. P4-free graphs). The tree structure and algebraic generation of cographs has been crucial for several concepts of graph decomposition such as modular and homogeneous decomposition. Moreover, it is fundamental for the recently introduced concept of clique-width of graphs which extends the famous concept of treewidth. It is well-known that the cographs are exactly those graphs of clique-width at most 2. In this paper, we show that the clique-width of gem- and co-gem-free graphs is at most 16.

A tree t-spanner T in a graph G is a spanning tree of G such that the distance in T between every pair of vertices is at most t times their distance in G. The TREE t-SPANNER problem asks whether a graph admits a tree t-spanner, given t. We substantially strengthen the hardness result of Cai and Corneil (SIAM J. Discrete Math. 8 (1995) 359 -387) by showing that, for any t ¿ 4, TREE t-SPANNER is NP-complete even on chordal graphs of diameter at most t + 1 (if t is even), respectively, at most t + 2 (if t is odd). Then we point out that every chordal graph of diameter at most t − 1 (respectively, t − 2) admits a tree t-spanner whenever t ¿ 2 is even (respectively, t ¿ 3 is odd), and such a tree spanner can be constructed in linear time.The complexity status of TREE 3-SPANNER still remains open for chordal graphs, even on the subclass of undirected path graphs that are strongly chordal as well. For other important subclasses of chordal graphs, such as very strongly chordal graphs (containing all interval graphs), 1-split graphs (containing all split graphs) and chordal graphs of diameter at most 2, we are able to decide TREE 3-SPANNER e ciently.

In a graph, a matching cut is an edge cut that is a matching. Matching Cut is the problem of deciding whether or not a given graph has a matching cut, which is known to be NP-complete even when restricted to bipartite graphs. It has been proved that Matching Cut is polynomially solvable for graphs of diameter two. In this paper, we show that, for any fixed integer d ≥ 3, Matching Cut is NPcomplete in the class of graphs of diameter d. This resolves an open problem posed by Borowiecki and Jesse-Józefczyk (2008) [6].We then show that, for any fixed integer d ≥ 4, Matching Cut is NP-complete even when restricted to the class of bipartite graphs of diameter d. Complementing the hardness results, we show that Matching Cut is polynomial-time solvable in the class of bipartite graphs of diameter at most three, and point out a new and simple polynomial-time algorithm solving Matching Cut in graphs of diameter 2.

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