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Computational Structural Biology Laboratory

With an interdisciplinary focus, research in our computational structural biology laboratory involves knowledge from multiple disciplines, such as physics, robotics, computer science, and biology. The long-term goal of our research is to understand the functional mechanisms of proteins, and to identify the roles of protein structure and dynamics in the realization of protein function. One of the primary ways in which this goal is being pursued is by developing novel computational methods that are inspired and transferred from research results in other disciplines, such as robotics.

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Computational Biology Laboratory

Supertrees are phylogenies (rooted evolutionary trees) assembled from smaller phylogenies that share some but not necessarily all taxa (leaf nodes) in common. Thus, supertrees can make novel statements about relationships of taxa that do not co-occur on any single input tree while still retaining hierarchical information from the input trees. As a method of combining existing phylogenetic information, supertrees potentially solve many of the problems associated with other methods (e.g., absence of homologous characters, incompatible data types, or non-overlapping sets of taxa). In addition to helping synthesize hypotheses of relationships among larger sets of taxa, supertrees can suggest optimal strategies for taxon sampling (either for future supertree construction or for experimental design issues such as choice of outgroups), can reveal emerging patterns in the large knowledge base of phylogenies currently in the literature, and can provide useful tools for comparative biologists who frequently have information about variation across much broader sets of taxa than those found in any one tree. This web site brings together information and tools to assist phylogenetic biologists and others interested in using supertrees in their research or teaching. It provides background information on the theory and links to examples with real data. It also provides a venue for archiving of software tools for supertree construction as they become available, as well as links to other efforts in this area.

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CS Staff Meeting

Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - 9:00am to 10:00am

CS Staff will meet from 9:00am - 10:00a.m. on Tuesday April 7th in 223 Atanasoff. 

Yan-Bin Jia

Yan-Bin Jia
Faculty
Professor
Area of Expertise: 
Robotics
Manipulation and Control
Mechanics

Wallapak Tavanapong

Professor
Area of Expertise: 
Multimedia Systems
Database Systems
Distributed Computing and Networks

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