A quick tour through phylogenetic networks

Vincent Moulton - University of East Anglia

Feb. 21, 2017, 2:30 p.m. - Feb. 21, 2017, 4 p.m.

WILSON WPROOM (Room 118)

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Biologists commonly represent the evolution of organisms using a phylogenetic tree, the tree-of-life providing a well-known example of such a tree. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly recognised that the evolutionary history of certain organisms (e.g. plants, viruses and bacteria) is not always best represented by a tree. This is due to evolutionary processes that take place on the molecular level, such as recombination, lateral gene transfer and recombination. In such cases phylogenetic networks — more complex leaf-labeled graphs — can provide a useful alternative to trees. In this talk we review some ways to construct phylogenetic networks, giving example applications
as we go, including a recent method that builds up networks from simpler networks called Trilonet.