Year: 2010
Type: report
Abstract: Molecular phylogenetics tries to infer evolutionary relationships on base of DNA and other molecular data. The resulting phylogenetic tree hopefully reflects the common ancestry of the species or individuals under consideration. So-called distance based methods first compute distances between the data and then search for a tree that gives a plausible explanation for the distance matrix. While the latter is an algorithmic problem of its own, already the distance measure is an issue. We discuss some of the mainstream approaches and then survey more recent approaches from the literature based on computational and statistical information theory. Finally we introduce an experimental web server implementation of these concepts. There is strong scientific indication that all living on earth grew out of a single “primordial form” in an evolutionary process ([10, 28]). A phylogenetic tree depicts the resulting phylogenetic relatedness between extinct and extant life forms. Phylogeny construction is an unsupervised learning problem. Research in the field is nowadays mainly based on molecular data like DNA or protein sequences. The art of assembling and managing phylogenetic trees has become a broad and active field of research (sometimes dubbed “phyloinformatics”, [9]). We survey only very few of it’s many aspects. We shortly summarize character based methods of phylogeny construction and then concentrate on distance based methods. 1 Character based methods Consider a set S of n taxa (e.g., species) whose phylogenetic history is to be estimated on base of assigned discrete string-shaped data items, called characteristics. These can be some typical DNA sequences or even vectors indicating presence/absence of certain morphological properties. Following [10] we consider the taxa as being the result of a
Authors: Carsten Damm, Markus Holzer, Martin Kutrib, Peter Leupold, Martin Plátek, Markéta Lopatková, Heribert Vollmer, Artiom Alhazov, Rudolf Freund, Kenichi Morita, Suna Bensch, Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes, Henning Bordihn, Andreas Malcher, Joachim Bremer, Dominik D. Freydenberger, Jens Doll, Manfred Droste, Ingmar Meinecke, Marian Kogler, Yurii Rogozhin, Sergey Verlan, Marcus Gelderie, Stefan Gulan, Pierre McKenzie, Sebastian Jakobi, Norbert Hundeshagen, Friedrich Otto, Marcel Vollweiler, Anna Kasprzik, Martin Lange, Florín Manea, Daniel Reidenbach, Markus L. Schmid, Torsten Stüber, Bianca Truthe
Language: German
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G5820817893
OpenAlex ID: W2190275688