Phylogentics workshop 09: Methods in Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution.

About the workshop

This workshop, proudly sponsored by the ARC Environmental Futures Network and hosted by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA was mostly practical in nature and take place in a computer lab setting to provide hands-on training for managing and analysing mitochondrial sequence, nuclear sequence, and SNP data sets. Four international experts have been chosen from the fields of bioinformatics and phylogenetics to teach the course and is targeted to early career researchers (2nd or 3rd year Postgraduate Candidates or Postdocs in the early stages of their career).

Dr. Alexei Drummond from the University of Auckland is a leader in the field of bioinformatics and coalescent methods and is the chief scientist for Biomatters, which created the software Geneious, an all-purpose bioinformatics software specifically tailored to be user-friendly for biologists. Additionally, Alexei created the Bayesian phylogenetic software analysis package BEAST, which can be used to construct phylogenetic trees, estimate rates of evolution, estimate Ne of populations, and detect bottlenecks.

Professor Peter Lockhart from Massey University is an expert on molecular evolution of plants. Peter's research has focused on plant species radiations, biodiversity, and biogeography in the Pacific.

Professor Mark Pagel from the University of Reading specializes in comparative phylogenetics and the mode and tempo of gene evolution.

A half-day session will be led by Christian Anderson, a PhD Candidate from the University of San Diego, who wrote the program code for Serial SimCoal, an extension of Excoffier's SimCoal that allows serial sampling through time. Christian will lead a half-day tutorial on the newly released Bayesian Serial SimCoal, which is useful for both contemporary and ancient samples.

Due to the positive response from participants we plan to run this workshop in 2010 pending presenters' availability