Related papers: New Routes to Phylogeography
Phylodynamics seeks to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. One way to accomplish this task formulates an observed sequence data likelihood exploiting…
Modern phylogenetics research is often performed within a Bayesian framework, using sampling algorithms such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to approximate the posterior distribution. These algorithms require careful evaluation of the…
Recent work has attempted to use whole-genome sequence data from pathogens to reconstruct the transmission trees linking infectors and infectees in outbreaks. However, transmission trees from one outbreak do not generalize to future…
Coalescent theory combined with statistical modeling allows us to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. When sequences are sampled serially through…
Phylogenomics, even more so than traditional phylogenetics, needs to represent the uncertainty in evolutionary trees due to systematic error. Here we illustrate the analysis of genome-scale alignments of yeast, using robust measures of the…
The coalescent is a stochastic process representing ancestral lineages in a population undergoing neutral genetic drift. Originally defined for a well-mixed population, the coalescent has been adapted in various ways to accommodate spatial,…
Phylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that…
Phylogenetic comparative methods are well established tools for using inter-species variation to analyse phenotypic evolution and adaptation. They are generally hampered, however, by predominantly univariate approaches and failure to…
Infectious diseases remain one of the major causes of human mortality and suffering. Mathematical models have been established as an important tool for capturing the features that drive the spread of the disease, predicting the progression…
Estimation of epidemiological and population parameters from molecular sequence data has become central to the understanding of infectious disease dynamics. Various models have been proposed to infer details of the dynamics that describe…
Bayesian inference methods rely on numerical algorithms for both model selection and parameter inference. In general, these algorithms require a high computational effort to yield reliable estimates. One of the major challenges in…
By providing a framework of accounting for the shared ancestry inherent to all life, phylogenetics is becoming the statistical foundation of biology. The importance of model choice continues to grow as phylogenetic models continue to…
We examine genetic statistics used in the study of structured populations. In a 1999 paper, Wakeley observed that the coalescent process associated with the finite island model can be decomposed into a scattering phase and a collecting…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Phylogenetics is a branch of computational biology that studies the evolutionary relationships among biological entities. Its long history and numerous applications notwithstanding, inference of phylogenetic trees from sequence data remains…
Inferring evolutionary histories (phylogenetic trees) has important applications in biology, criminology and public health. However, phylogenetic trees are complex mathematical objects that reside in a non-Euclidean space, which complicates…
Phylogeny is the field of modelling the temporal discrete dynamics of speciation. Complex models can nowadays be studied using the Approximate Bayesian Computation approach which avoids likelihood calculations. The field's progression is…
The inference of the evolutionary history of a collection of organisms is a problem of fundamental importance in evolutionary biology. The abundance of DNA sequence data arising from genome sequencing projects has led to significant…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
A central problem in biology is to understand how organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by acquiring variations in the observable characteristics or traits of species across the tree of life. With the growing availability of…