• Calendar

July 22, Tuesday
12:00 – 14:00

The rapid accumulation of genetic material (e.g. sequencing of genes and genomes) and the prediction of new proteins should help us to better understand evolution at the molecular level. This task, however, is not trivial. First, the evolution of many organisms includes operations such as horizontal transfers (i.e. events of transferring genetic material from one lineage in the evolutionary tree to a different lineage) and rearrangements of genetic material. Thus, it requires accurate modeling of complex biological phenomena. Second, as most of the problems in the field are NP-hard, it requires designing sophisticated algorithms and heuristics for accurate and fast inference of evolutionary models. In this talk I will describe our recent attempts to address these challenges. I will discuss hardness issues related to inferring phylogenetic trees and networks, and will describe a few approaches for modeling and inferring evolution in the presence of horizontal gene transfer, partial horizontal gene transfer, and rearrangements of genetic material. No background in biology will be assumed.