Genome 570

Phylogenetic Inference

Spring, 2006

Joe Felsenstein

Syllabus of lectures

Date

Topic

Reading

     
3/27 What is a phylogeny? Parsimony - a small example Chapter 1
  29 Parsimony algorithms - small parsimony problem Chapter 2
3/31 Exact enumeration - the number of trees Chapter 3
     
4/3 Searching tree space heuristically Chapter 4
  5 Branch and bound Chapter 5
  7 Reconstruction of ancestral character states.
Branch lengths; Variants of parsimony
Chapters 6, 7
     
4/10 Variants of parsimony, cont'd; Compatibility Chapters 7, 8
  12 Inconsistency and parsimony Chapter 9
  14    "   "   "   "  "  
     
4/17 A brief discussion of philosophy, parsimony, history etc. Chapter 10
  19 Distance matrix methods: UPGMA, Fitch-Margoliash Chapter 11
  21      "    "      "    : Neighbor-joining, Minimum evolution, etc. Chapter 11
     
4/24 DNA distances incl. rate variation among sites Chapter 13
  26 Protein distances and models Chapter 14
  28 Restriction sites, RAPDs, microsatellites, etc. Chaps. 14, 15
     
5/1 Likelihood methods Chapter 16 (through page 259)
  3 Hidden Markov Models of rate variation Chapter 16 (page 259 on)
  5 Guest lecture:  Ken Karol on
    Genes, gyrogonites and genomes:
      what they reveal about the evolution of green plants.
 
     
5/8 Bayesian inference Chapter 18
  10 Testing trees, clocks, etc. by likelihood ratio tests Chapter 19
  12 The bootstrap, the jackknife, etc. Chapter 20
     
5/15    "   "   "      "   "   
  17 Paired sites tests Chapter 21
  19 Trees from continuous characters and gene frequencies Chaps. 23, 24
     
5/22 Comparative methods Chapter 25
  24 Another kind of tree: Coalescents Chapter 26
  26 Likelihoods on coalescents Guest lecture: Mary Kuhner Chapter 27
     
5/29 HOLIDAY (Memorial Day; last day of NW Folk Life Festival)  
5/31 Consensus trees. Tree distances. Chapter 30
6/2 Tests based on tree shape. Drawing rooted and unrooted trees Chaps. 33, 34

Final Exam:

2:30-4:30 Wednesday, June 7 in J280 HSB

Textbook:

Felsenstein, J. 2004. Inferring Phylogenies. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland Massachusetts.

What is being left out

Owing to the press of time, I have not been able to schedule lectures on three major topics: Quartets methods (Chapter 12), Hadamard methods (Chapter 17), and Invariants (Chapter 22). These are all methods of particularly great interests to those concerned with the mathematical structures underlying the inference of phylogenies. Students will not be held for this material but are encouraged to read it anyway.