Strengthening topological colorful results for graphs

Various results ensure the existence of large complete and colorful bipartite graphs in properly colored graphs when some condition related to a topological lower bound on the chromatic number is satisfied. We generalize three theorems of this kind, respectively due to Simonyi and Tardos 2006), Simonyi et al. (2013), and Chen 2011). As a consequence of the generalization of Chen's theorem, we get new families of graphs whose chromatic number equals their circular chromatic number and that satisfy Hedetniemi's conjecture for the circular chromatic number. (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.