Date |
April 16, 2012 |
Speaker |
Dr. Jesper Jansson, The Hakubi Project at Kyoto University
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Title |
Combinatorial Algorithms for Building a Phylogenetic Supertree
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Abstract |
A more than 150-year-old data structure known as a "phylogenetic tree" can
be used to describe the evolutionary history of a given set of related
objects such as biological species, proteins, natural languages, spam e-mail
messages, etc.
A current research trend in Phylogenetics is to develop good methods for
merging an input collection of (possibly conflicting) phylogenetic trees
into a single "supertree" while keeping as much branching information as
possible.
In this talk, I will describe some simple combinatorial algorithms for
constructing phylogenetic supertrees from so-called "rooted triplets" (small
phylogenetic trees with exactly three leaves each), discuss a number of
recent extensions of these algorithms, and present a few interesting related
open problems.
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