Orthology relations: From trees to networks
Time and place
12:20 PM on Thursday, March 2nd, 2017; NAC 6/113
Katharina Huber ( University of East Anglia, UK)
Abstract
Reconstructing the evolutionary past of a family of genes is an important aspect of many genomic studies. To help with this, simple relations on a set of sequences called orthology relations may be employed. In addition to being interesting from a practical point of view, they are also attractive from a theoretical perspective in that e.g. a characterization is known for when such a relation is representable by a certain type of phylogenetic tree. A natural approach to overcome the problem that real biological data hardly ever satisfies that characterization might be to correct the data in some way or another. Recent work however suggests that this approach has major drawbacks. Starting with a brief introduction into the area of phylogenetic networks and trees, we present recent results concerning the use of such networks (as opposed to phylogenetic trees) for representing orthology relations.
