Descripción

A famous evolutionary geneticist once said ‘Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.’ In biology we often wish to understand why biodiversity exhibits certain phenotypic, genetic and spatial patterns. To answer such questions, we need a comparative context and this context can only come from an understanding of the diversification of life. Phylogenetics is the field dedicated to inferring the history of life on earth at any scale, from populations within species to among phyla across deep evolutionary time.  The most data-rich source of information for reconstructing evolutionary history is DNA sequence data.  Biology is currently experiencing a technological revolution making genomic-scale data accessible to laboratories around the world. In parallel with these technological advances, computational methods of statistical inference have rapidly developed to take advantage of these larger data sets. The course, Phylogenomics, will introduce students to the fundamental theories and methods in phylogenetic systematics. Topics include an introduction to the 3 schools of inference, modern population genetic approaches to phylogenetics, and statistical tools such as the bootstrap and Bayesian inference.