Evolution operates on whole genomes through mutations that change the
order and strandedness of genes within the genomes. These events are
examples of "rare genomic changes," which have low frequency and high
signal-to-noise ratio. Thus analyses of gene-order data present new
opportunities for discoveries about deep evolutionary events, provided
that sufficiently accurate methods can be developed to reconstruct
evolutionary trees.
In this talk I will present our results in distance-based genome
rearrangement phylogeny reconstruction. We approach the problem by
developing new statistically-based true evolutionary distance estimators.
In our simulation study, we obtain highly accurate trees by using these
new distance estimators, even when the amount of evolution in the
dataset is high. Furthermore, these new methods greatly outperform
previous distance-based approaches with respect to topological accuracy.
This is joint work with Robert Jansen and Tandy Warnow (University of
Texas) and Bernard Moret (University of New Mexico).
Li-San Wang is a faculty candidate.
April 7, 2003 at 3:00 p.m. in DH 1070
Reception preceding the presentation at 2:30 p.m. in DH 3076
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