Course info

Phylogenetic analyses and molecular evolution are exciting and rapidly developing field of studies and are increasingly important in many different fields of biological research, particularly as advances in molecular genetic techniques have made large DNA sequence data sets readily available. The molecular data could provide insight into a) understanding how and why DNA sequences and genomes change, and b) reconstructing the evolutionary history of genes, genomes, and organisms. This course covers the basic methods of phylogenetic analysis and their application in fields such as systematics, comparative biology, molecular evolution, population genetics and genomics. Lectures will emphasize the logical basis and computational details of various tree-building algorithms and associated methods of hypothesis testing, as well as novel applications of phylogenetic analysis in various fields of biology. Computer-based projects will give students the opportunity to implement these methods using a variety of phylogenetic and bioinformatics tools. Overall, the fundamental concepts of molecular evolution and their relevance to bioinformatics studies will be emphasized