Abstract

Phylogenetics is essential for comparing biological species and understanding biodiversity for conservation. This tutorial discusses the basic principles and methods of phylogenetic inference and what you can learn from phylogenetic estimation. It is intended to help you make informed decisions about which methods to use in your research.

About This Material

This is a Hands-on Tutorial from the GTN which is usable either for individual self-study, or as a teaching material in a classroom.

Questions this will address

• What information can I get from a phylogenetic tree?
• How do I estimate a phylogeny?
• How can I tell whether the phylogeny is reliable?
• How do phylogenetic models work?

Learning Objectives

• Describe the basic concepts behind phylogenetic trees and how they are made
• Read and interrogate a phylogeny encountered in the literature
• Use standard tools to align a set of molecular sequences
• Assess the quality of a molecular sequence alignment and be able to modify it appropriately for phylogenetic analysis
• Use standard tools to estimate a phylogenetic tree based on a set of aligned molecular sequences
• Assess the reliability of estimated phylogenies with bootstrapping
• Explore phylogenetic signal using phylogenetic networks