Educational video on the Tree of Life

In the blog of Jun-Hoe Lee, a former visiting student in my lab, I found this interesting video from Yale university on the Tree of Life and the efforts to reconstruct it.

  

I think it is a good piece for popular communication of science and conveys pretty reasonably well the problem. Of course, there are simplifications and some important aspects such as that of horizontal transfer of genes, symbioses, and their effects on the tree are not covered, but it provides an attractive and educational introduction to the problem of assembling the tree of life. 

Brief introductory article to phylogenomics

I would like to share a brief introductory article to Phylogenomics and Genome Evolution that I wrote by request from the Roche Institute portal. The idea was to provide an overview to the general audience of what is phylogenomics about and what are the main challenges ahead.

The article is also available in Spanish.

Learn Neighbor Joining method in 1-minute video.

 Hi,

 Have a ruler, a pen, scissors and some tape and glue around?... enough to reconstruct the tree of apes!.

I came across a short video, which illustrates for the general public how to build a phylogenetic tree from pair-wise distances.  The video has been made by Hidetoshi Shimodaira, the guy behind CONSEL package. I am already using it for teaching purposes.

Will we have one on ML and Bayesian reconstruction?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwiWgVdJ4Y8

Bioinformatics Summer School in Bratislava

Just a quick announcement for a 1-week summer school of bioinformatics in Bratislava, in which I will be lecturing. You can have more info here. 

 Here is a short description from the course website:

The summer school will provide an overview of several areas of computational biology, covering concrete tools, examples of their use, and underlying models and methods. Intended audience includes biologists who want to become more experienced bioinformatics users as well as computer scientists, mathematicians and others who are interested in this exciting research area. The summer school is primarily targeted at doctoral students and postdocs, although more experienced researchers or Master students are welcome to attend as well. The program will include lectures, practical workshops, and research seminars given by experienced researchers from several countries. Working language is English.