Stockholm Phylogenomics Group announces – Upcoming talk at the Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, Stockholm, March 24.
Speakers: Alexandre Antonelli (University of Gothenburg),
Hannes Hettling and Rutger Vos (Naturalis Biodiversity Center,
the Netherlands)
Title: SUPERSMART: Ecology and evolution in the era of big data
Time: March 24 at 15:00-16:00
Venue: Room 525, Naturhistoriska riksmuseet, Stockholm
Host: Fredrik Ronquist
Abstract: Rapidly growing biological data volumes – including
molecular sequences and fossil records – hold an unprecedented
potential to reveal how evolutionary processes generate and
maintain biodiversity. However, most studies integrating these
data use an idiosyncratic step-by-step approach for the
reconstruction of time-calibrated phylogenies. We will present a
novel conceptual framework, termed SUPERSMART (Self-Updating
Platform for Estimating Rates of Speciation and Migration, Ages,
and Relationships of Taxa), and present our proof of concept for
dealing with the moving targets of biodiversity research. This
framework reconstructs dated phylogenies based on the assembly
of molecular and genomic datasets. The data handled for each step
are continuously updated as databases accumulate new records. We
believe that this emerging framework will provide an invaluable
tool for a wide range of hypothesis-driven research questions in
systematics and evolution. For more information please see
http://www.supersmart-project.org.