Seminars & Events

REMINDER: CELS Seminar/ Suzanne Matthews, Texas A&M University
""Fast Algorightms for Exploring Large Collections of Phylogenetic Trees""

DATE: January 30, 2012 to January 30, 2012
TIME: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
LOCATION: building 240/ Conference Room 4301, Argonne National Laboratory

Description:
Evolutionary relationships between a group of organisms are commonly summarized in a phylogenetic tree. The goal of phylogenetic inference is to infer the best tree structure that represents the relationships between a group of organisms, given a series of observations (e.g., molecular sequences). However, the most popular heuristics for inferring phylogenetic trees tend to output tens to hundreds of thousands of equally weighted trees. Biologists commonly encapsulate these trees into a single tree, which is referred to as the consensus. The assumption for building a consensus tree is that the information discarded is less important than the information retained. But, what if this assumption is not true?

In this talk, I will present compelling evidence that retaining and studying tree collections is valuable. Due to the burgeoning nature of phylogenetic analysis, high performance algorithms are needed to allow biologists to easily study and share tree collections. I will also describe two of my algorithms, MrsRF and TreeZip, which are the fastest and most efficient methods for comparing and storing trees. Lastly, I will briefly describe PVCS, a novel version control system that will make it easier for biologists to easily retain and share the results of their phylogenetic analyses.

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