Scaling in Biological and Social Networks - Abstract - Blum
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| Workshop Navigation |
Phylogenetic tree shape
Michael BLUM (CNRS, University of Grenoble I)
The explosion of phylogenetic studies not only provides a clear snapshot of biodiversity, but also makes it possible to infer how the diversity has arisen. To this aim, variation in speciation and extinction rates have been investigated through their signatures in the shapes of phylogenetic trees. This issue is of great importance, as fitting stochastic models to tree data would help to understand underlying macroevolutionary processes. Although the prevailing view is that it does not represent phylogenies so well, the most popular model of phylogenetic trees is a branching process introduced by Yule, in which lineages split at random. Here we report the sudy of one major database of published phylogenies using the Yule model as well as several other models. Our results confirm the previous observation that the Yule model is inadequate to describe phylogenetic tree data. In addition, they support the hypothesis that many trees are consistent with a simple branch split model first considered by Aldous in 1996.
Joint Work with Olivier FRANCOIS (University of Grenoble, INPG)
M.G.B. Blum and O.Francois. Which random processes describe the Tree of Life? A large-scale study of phylogenetic tree imbalance. Systematic Biology 55 (4): 685-691, 2006. Supplementary Material