Bioinformatics: Molecular Phylogenetics

New

The course will provide training for bench-based biologists to use molecular data to construct and interpret phylogenies, and test their hypotheses. Delegates will gain hands-on practice of using a variety of programs freely available online and commonly used in molecular studies, interspersed with some lectures.

Further information for this session is available here.

Please note that if you are not eligible for a University of Cambridge Raven account you will need to book by linking here.

This course is aimed at bench-based biologists with limited or no knowledge of the field of molecular evolution and with some experience of examining DNA/protein sequence data. Syllabus, Tools and Resources

• Basic computing skills
• Graduate level in Life Sciences

Number of sessions: 3

After this course you should be able to…

• Appreciate some advantages and limitations of alternative molecular analyses
• Use some freely available software to conduct molecular analyses
• Interpret analyses in their biological context
• Appreciate the importance of statistical rigour in molecular analyses

During this course you will learn about…

• Features of phylogenies and clade support
• Data interpretation:
• Methods of phylogenetic reconstruction: distance-based, maximum likelhodd, Bayesian (PHLIP, PhyML)
• Hypothesis testing and tree support: model comparison, non-parametric bootstrap, MCMC (ModelTest, PAML, MrBayes)

Presentations, demonstrations and practicals

3

A number of times per year

• Bioinformatics: Multiple Sequence Alignment and Phylogenetics
• Bioinformatics: Interpreting Phylogenies
• Bioinformatics: Introduction to Phylogenetic Tree-Building