Genome Evolution Course – 2009-2010

The Tree of Life as revealed by Phylogenetics

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Presentation: PPT or PDF

Essay version

Topics

• Trees as evolutionary hypotheses
• Tree types and terminology
• A tree based upon the molecular clock
• UPGMA
• Human history
• A tree based upon minimum evolution
• Neighbor Joining
• The tree of life
• Rooting the tree of life
• Gene trees
• The endosymbiotic theory
• Character-based method: Maximum parsimony
• Bootstrapping

Suggested readings

• Woese and Fox (1977) discover a third form of life
• Gyllensten and colleagues (2000) study the origin of modern humans through the mitochondria
• Andersson and colleagues (1998) sequence the closest free-living relative of the mitochondria
• Graur and Li. Chapter 5 of "Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution".

Assignment

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Back to the Genome Evolution Course.

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Itai Yanai, yanai@technion.ac.il