The dual immaculate functions are a basis of the ring QSym of quasisymmetric functions and form one of the most natural analogues of the Schur functions. The dual immaculate function corresponding to a composition is a weighted generating function for immaculate tableaux in the same way as a Schur function is for semistandard Young tableaux; an immaculate tableau is defined similarly to a semistandard Young tableau, but the shape is a composition rather than a partition, and only the first column is required to strictly increase (whereas the other columns can be arbitrary, but each row has to weakly increase). Dual immaculate functions were introduced by Berg, Bergeron, Saliola, Serrano, and Zabrocki in arXiv:1208.5191, and have since been found to possess numerous nontrivial properties.

In this note, we prove a conjecture of M. Zabrocki that provides an alternative construction for the dual immaculate functions in terms of certain “vertex operators”. The proof uses a dendriform structure on the ring QSym; we discuss the relation of this structure to known dendriform structures on the combinatorial Hopf algebras FQSym and WQSym.