Abstract:
In computational biology, relations between genes can be represented in the form of a tree, inferred from a set of molecular sequences. Under some general assumptions, such a tree can be interpreted as an evolutionary gene family tree. In a similar way, one can infer an evolutionary species tree, by using whole genomes or a single gene family. While the evolution of genes and species seems to be shaped in a similar way, inferred gene tree and its corresponding species tree are usually incongruent. Such differences can be explained by macro-evolutionary events such as gene duplication and loss in the model of reconciled trees. Informally, the concept of reconciliation is to embed a gene tree into its species tree by using the minimal number of these events. Starting from early works by R. Page in the nineties of the XXth century, the model has been applied in many contexts such as supertree problems, genomic duplication inference, horizontal gene transfer detection, metagenomics and many others. During the talk, I will present recent theoretical and algorithmic advances in the tree reconciliation model.
Bio:
Paweł Górecki is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of University of Warsaw, Poland. He received his scientific degrees from the University of Warsaw: MS in computer science (1999), MS in mathematics (2000) and PhD in computer science (2006). He was a postdoc-toral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Ge-netics in Berlin. His research is focused on the algorith-mic and theoretical proper-ties of problems and models in computational biology.