| UTAS Collaborators | School of Mathematics & Physics |
|---|---|
| Funding Source | ARC grant (FT100100031) |
| Project Status | Current |
Hybridization is believed to be important during adaptive radiations where species rapidly colonize new niches and respond to new environments, e.g. in times of climate change. This project aims to create the statistical tools and software required for evolutionary biologists to understand how hybridization has helped shape the Australian flora.
Hybrid evolution plays a key role in speciation and adaptation, especially in plants. Hybrid species inherit genetic material from two parent species, making them hard to detect by studying single genes. Fortunately, innovations in DNA sequencing now make it affordable to study many genes simultaneously. Current methods for studying hybridization assume that evolutionary relationships inferred for different genes are error-free, all conflict is attributed to hybridization. However, in reality conflict is often caused by estimation errors, the random nature of inheritance within populations, and missing data. We are developing new statistical and computational techniques to use genomic data to infer when and where hybridization has occurred.
Papers
Michael Woodhams, Dorothy A. Steane, Rebecca C. Jones, Dean Nicolle, Vincent Moulton, Barbara Holland. Novel Distances for Dollo Data. (preprint available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.0072.pdf).
Sumner, J., B. Kaine, M. Woodhams, J. Fernandez-Sanchez, P. Jarvis, B. R. Holland. 2012. Is the GTR model bad for phylogenetics? Syst. Biol. (in press, accepted 19th March).
Sumner, J.G., B.R. Holland, and P.D Jarvis. 2011. The algebra of the general Markov model on phylogenetic trees and networks. Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (published online 6 October 2011, DOI 10.1007/s11538-011-9691-z).
Talks
Invited speaker at the School of Mathematics, University of Adelaide, Australia. Current statistical challenges for molecular phylogenetics (May, 2011)
Keynote speaker at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK. Workshop on Phylogenetics: New data new challenges. Phylogenies from DArTs: A stochastic Dollo process with censored data (June, 2011).
Midsummer Phylogenetics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Phylogenies from DArTs: A stochastic Dollo process with censored data
Project Leaders (External)
Dr Barbara Holland, Barbara.Holland@utas.edu.au (School of Maths and Physics)
Members (External)
Dr Jeremy Sumner, Jeremy.Sumber@utas.edu.au (School of Maths and Physics)