Phylogeny and Evolution

"The phylogenetic tree is a central concept in biology for students in the majors "Biodiversity, Ecology & Evolution," "Agricultural Biology," and "Eco-epidemiology." To introduce students to phylogeny, this course unit is divided into two consecutive parts, each lasting 22.5 hours: “Phylogeny and Evolution (Fundamentals)” (HAB708B) and “Phylogeny and Evolution (Advanced)” (HAB714B).

The following subjects will be taught there:

(i) History of the Concept of Evolution [Basics].

(ii) Phylogenetic systematics (characters, rules of taxonomy, molecular barcoding, genomics, alignment, homology and homoplasy, orthology and paralogy) [half in the Basics course; half in the Advanced course].

(iii) Phylogenetic representation (networks, trees, roots, dendrograms, topology, branch lengths) [Basics].

(iv) Methods of phylogenetic inference based on distances [Advanced].

(v) The cladistic approach and the principle of maximum parsimony [Basics].

(vi) The probabilistic approach, the maximum likelihood principle, and sequence evolution models [Advanced].

(vii) Measures of phylogenetic robustness (bootstrapping, topology comparison, multigene corroboration, gene and species trees) [Advances].

(viii) Applications to the phylogeny of several major taxonomic groups (Mammals, Eukaryotes) [Progress]."

Read phylogenetic trees and their notation in parentheses, and understand the information conveyed by their topologies and branch lengths. [Basics].

Reconstructing Trees Using Distance-Based Methods. [Advanced].