From genome to phylome: what can we learn from genome-wide collections of trees?

September 22th, 2009
3 pm
LIRMM - Seminar Room

Toni Gabaldon
CRG-Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain
http://www.crg.es/comparative_genomics

In the genomic era it has been possible to move from the evolutionary analysis of single protein families (phylogenetics) to that of complete genomes and proteomes (phylogenomics). To achieve this transition new tools have been developed that allow the large-scale reconstruction of thousands of phylogenetic trees in an automatic way. The reconstruction of these huge datasets and its interpretation has posed many technical and conceptual challenges but has also proven to be a very useful tool in the evolutionary and functional analysis of protein families. In this talk I will provide an overview of our contributions to this field, including the generation of model-species phylomes, and our approach for phylogeny-based inference of orthology and paralogy.