Insight into the evolutionary past of organisms has profound consequences for many areas affecting our daily life, including drug development, food production, agriculture, and biodiversity conservation to name but a few.
Examples of applications where our new algorithms and methodologies have shed light include the evolutionary past of yeast [1] (which is of use in classifying yeast which cause food spoilage), the origin of the evolutionary phenomenon of polyploidy [2] (which is very common in plants, including crops such as wheat), understanding the genetic diversity and dispersal of plants [3], reconstructing/understanding the evolution of viruses such as Hepatitis and SARS [4], and shedding light in the evolutionary relationships between over 500 different wheat varieties [5] some of which are part of the GEDIFLUX EU Framework V project.
References
- Wu, Q., James, S., Roberts, I., Moulton, V., Huber,K.T., Exploring contradictory phylogenetic relationships in yeast, FEMS Yeast Research.
- Brysting, A., Oxelman, B., Huber,K.T., Moulton,V., Brochmann,C., Untangling complex histories of genome mergings in high polyploids, Systematic Biology, 56, 2007, 467-476.
- Winkworth, R., Bryant, D., Lockhart, P., Havell, D., Moulton, V., Biogeographic interpretation of split graphs: Least squares optimization of edge lengths Systematic Biology, 54, 2005, 56-65.
- Magiorkinis, G., Magiorkinis, E., Paraskevis, D., Vandamme, A.M., Van Ranst, M., Moulton, V., Hatzakiu, A., Phylogenetic analysis of the full-length SARS-CoV sequences: Evidence for phylogenetic discordance in three genomic regions Journal of Medical Virology, 74(3), 2004, 369-372.
- Kettleborough, G., Dicks, J., Roberts, I.N., Huber, K.T. Reconstructing (Super)trees from data sets with missing distances: Not all is lost, Molecular Biology and Evolution 36(6), 2015, 1628-1642.