Computational Methods for Analyzing Phylogenetic Trees
Speaker: Katherine St. John, City University of New York
When: 2006-04-26 14:00:00
Venue: 50-3
Host: George Havas
Abstract:Evolutionary histories, or phylogenies, form an integral part of
much work in biology. In addition to the intrinsic interest in the
interrelationships between species, phylogenies are used for drug
design, multiple sequence alignment, and even as evidence in a
recent criminal trial. Much work has been done on designing
algorithms that build phylogenetic trees given representative
sequences of their DNA. The optimization criteria preferred by
biologists for building trees is NP-hard. So, heuristics are often
used that return many possible trees, instead of single optimal
tree. This talk concentrates on the heuristics used for tree
reconstruction, as well as how to summarize, analyze, and visualize
these sets of trees. In particular, we will focus on fast
reconstruction methods with provably nice properties, calculating
biologically meaningful distances between trees quickly, and
visualizing large sets of trees using the treecomp package designed
by our group, as a module for the Mesquite system (developed by
Wayne and David Maddison).
(This work is joint with Nina Amenta, David Hillis, Tamara Munzner,
and Tandy Warnow and is supported by grants from the National
Science Foundation.)
Biography:(biography unavailable)
Type: ITEE Seminar
Contact:George Havas, seminar host (havas@itee.uq.edu.au)
or Guido Governatori (ITEE seminar co-ordinator)
(guido@itee.uq.edu.au)