Graham Jones

Post doktor

Tel: 031-786 ??
E-post: art@gjones.name
Fax: 031-786 25 60

Research

Many organisms, especially plants, are allopolyploids. This complicates the inference of phylogenetic relationships between such species, since there is no longer a straightforward tree. Furthermore, the relevant evolutionary events (ordinary speciation and extinction together with hybridization) are often recent, so the issue of incomplete lineage sorting cannot be ignored.

Programs such as *BEAST and BEST use the multispecies coalescent model to infer species trees in the presence of incomplete lineage sorting without considering hybridization. My project aims to extend this approach so that it can also deal with allopolyploids. A simplifying assumption is that the diploid genomes residing in the allopolyploid organisms evolve without recombining with each other. Compared to the multispecies coalescent model there is an extra ambiguity since there is no way that different sequence copies from a single organism can be assigned to the correct genome a priori.

More information
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