Next on PhyloSeminar.org: The End of Lineage Sorting: Inferring species trees using *BEAST

Hello everyone!

I'm excited to announce that Joseph Heled will be speaking in a bit less than a week about his joint work with Alexei Drummond on lineage sorting. In addition to a usual talk, he will also be giving a little software demonstration. His abstract is below.

After Joseph will come Noah Rosenberg, who will be speaking in late February (probably the 24th), then Jens Lagergren in late March.

The End of Lineage Sorting: Inferring species trees using *BEAST

Until recently it has been common practice for a phylogenetic analysis to use a single gene sequence from a single individual organism as a proxy for an entire species. With advances in sequenceing technology it is becoming more common to see data sets containing multiple genes from multiple individuals per species. The "simple" way of analyzing those data sets by concatenating sequences from an individual is problematic when species have only recently diverged. In this talk we explain the problem of Incomplete Lineage Sorting, the gene trees within species tree model, the theoretical basis of the multi species coalescent and how to analyze those data sets using *BEAST, a method for species tree inference made available in BEAST 1.5.
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Thanks, and pass the word onto your species-tree-interested friends!

Erick