A special case of Vu’s conjecture: colouring nearly disjoint graphs of bounded maximum degree

Abstract A collection of graphs is nearly disjoint if every pair of them intersects in at most one vertex. We prove that if $G_1, \dots, G_m$ are nearly disjoint graphs of maximum degree at most $D$ , then the following holds. For every fixed $C$ , if each vertex $v \in \bigcup _{i=1}^m V(G_i)$ is contained in at most $C$ of the graphs $G_1, \dots, G_m$ , then the (list) chromatic number of $\bigcup _{i=1}^m G_i$ is at most $D + o(D)$ . This result confirms a special case of a conjecture of Vu and generalizes Kahn’s bound on the list chromatic index of linear uniform hypergraphs of bounded maximum degree. In fact, this result holds for the correspondence (or DP) chromatic number and thus implies a recent result of Molloy and Postle, and we derive this result from a more general list colouring result in the setting of ‘colour degrees’ that also implies a result of Reed and Sudakov.