Download Presentation title: An introduction to phylogenetic inference Abstract

Presentation title: An introduction to phylogenetic inference Abstract: Phylogenies are fantastically important in biology. In addition to telling us the relationships among organisms, they can be used to date evolutionary divergences, delineate species, track disease outbreaks, understand molecular evolution, and inform conservation decisions. This talk will give a quick overview of some of these applications, and then delve deeper into the methods that can be used to infer phylogenies from molecular sequence data. The talk will explain and compare parsimony methods, distance methods, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian approaches to phylogenetic inference. It will finish up by introducing some of the most‐recent methodological advances for inferring phylogenies from phylogenomic datasets – gigantic datasets that can include thousands genes from thousands of species.