PhD course Current Trends in Phylogenetics, 24-28 October 2011, Biosystematics Group, Wageningen University
The aim of this course is to present both the theoretical background as well as a hands-on approach to phylogenetic reconstruction. The course will treat current software and platforms, and will focus on how phylogenetic analysis may help in testing hypotheses in the student’s own project.
Content: There will be a mixture of lectures in the morning and practical sessions in the afternoon. Topics that will be addressed include i) data & quality, ii) tree building: parsimony (including character support, consensus analysis, and treesearch using TNT), data modelling and maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches to tree building and Markov Chain analysis, and iii) orthologue detection, species trees from gene trees, and statistical approaches to inferring trends on phylogenetic trees. Each course day will be concluded with brief PhD project-presentation by the students, and on Thursday there will be a course diner. Students, whom we expect to have some basic understanding of both molecular biology and systematic theory, will have the opportunity to bring their own DNA sequence alignments for analysis, otherwise datasets will be provided in the course.
Fee: €500,-- for PhD students with approved iTSP’s of the research schools EPS, VLAG, PE&RC and WIAS, and postdocs of EPS; all others €700,--
Number of participants: max 12
Registration: Registrations should be accompanied by a short CV (indicating the nature and stage of your research project) can be sent to Dr. Freek Bakker: freek.bakker@wur.nl till September 20th. In principle, priority will be given to PhD’s of the Graduate Schools EPS and Biodiversity that are in the possession of an approved Training & Supervision Plan. The number of course participants is set to 12, and in case of exceeding numbers of registrations, the course organizers will make a selection and inform you by October 1st whether you can attend and how to pay the course fees. Please do not pay the fees until you know you will attend the course! A few weeks prior to the start of the course you will receive some literature, some of which we will consider familiar to you before the course starts.