Computational molecular evolution

The need for effective and informed analysis of biological sequence data is increasing with the explosive growth of biological sequence databases. A molecular evolutionary framework is central to many Bioinformatics approaches used in these analyses. Additionally, explicit use of molecular evolutionary and phylogenetic analyses provide important insights in their own right, e.g., analysis of adaptive evolution in viruses providing clues of their interaction with host immune systems.

To this end, we aim to provide graduate and postgraduate researchers with the theoretical knowledge and practical skills to carry out molecular evolutionary analyses on sequence data. The course will entail data retrieval and assembly, alignment techniques, phylogeny reconstruction, hypothesis testing, and population genetic approaches. The course will cover sessions on analysis of both protein and nucleotide sequences, including NGS data. However, we do not cover traditional NGS analyses.