题目：     Genomic and evolutionary insights from molecular clocks                                

报告人：  Simon Ho 教授                

                  School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

时间：      2016年10月26日15:30

地点：     中国科学院动物研究所

会议室： C101

联系人： 罗阿蓉（luoar@ioz.ac.cn）、朱朝东（zhucd@ioz.ac.cn）

Molecular clocks are models that describe variation in rates of genetic change among organisms, allowing us to infer evolutionary timescales using phylogenetic analyses of DNAsequence data. A wide variety of clock models are now available, including those that allow rates to vary across branches in the tree. Over the past five decades, molecular clocks have been pivotal in resolving the timescale of the Tree of Life.

Genome-scale data are now being produced at an astonishing rate, opening up exciting prospects for gaining detailed insights into the molecular evolutionary process. They also present anopportunity for refining our estimates of evolutionary timescales. I provide an overview of some of the approaches that have been used to estimate evolutionarytimescales from genome-scale data, drawing on several recent examples from mywork. I also describe how a phylogenetic approach can be used to provide insight into molecular evolutionary dynamics, with particular reference to the “pacemaker” models of genome evolution.

About the speaker

Simon is a Professor of Molecular Evolution at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in 2006 (University of Oxford), then did postdoctoral work at Oxford and the Australian National University. Simon joined the University of Sydney in 2010, where he now leads the Molecular Ecology, Evolution, and Phylogenetics Lab. His research interests include phylogenetic methods, evolutionary models, and molecular clocks. The focus of Simon’s recent work has been on describing patterns of evolutionary rate variation across genomes and on phylogenomic estimation of evolutionary timescales.

http://sydney.edu.au/science/people/simon.ho.php

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