Exploring Treespace

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• St John, K (CUNY)
• Monday 20 June 2011, 16:30-16:50
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mustapha Amrani.

Phylogenetics

Phylogenies, or evolutionary histories, play a central role in modern biology, illustrating the interrelationships between species, and also aiding the prediction of structural, physiological, and biochemical properties. The reconstruction of the underlying evolutionary history from a set of morphological characters or biomolecular sequences is difficult since the optimality criteria favored by biologists are NP-hard, and the space of possible answers is huge. The number of possible phylogenetic trees for n taxa is (2n − 5)!!. Due to the hardness and the large number of possible answers, clever searching techniques and heuristics are used to estimate the underlying tree. We explore the underlying space of trees, under different metrics, in particular the nearest-neighbor-interchange (NNI), subtree-prune-and-regraft (SPR), tree-bisection-and-reconnection (TBR), and Robinson-Foulds (RF) distances.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All CMS events
• Featured lists
• INI info aggregator
• Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series
• School of Physical Sciences
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.