Objective
Phylogenies are used to describe the history of evolutionarily related biological entities (e.g. genes, individuals, species) and are central in many biological applications, including functional genomics, epidemiology and biodiversity assessment. Many methods for reconstructing and studying phylogenies have been proposed, almost all of which use trees to represent them. Although in many cases this is reasonable, in many others phylogenies should be represented as networks (more precisely directed acyclic graphs). This is due to a number of biological phenomena collectively known as recombination, which are common in viruses (e.g. HIV and influenza), bacteria and sexual populations. Unfortunately recently proposed methods to reconstruct network phylogenies have not yet found many applications in evolutionary biology. I believe that this is due to the fact that many of these methods aim to explain all conflicting signal in the data with recombination, thus inferring far more recombination events than what is actually needed. I therefore propose a number of techniques whose goal is to explore the gap that is left between classical tree reconstruction, where no recombination is allowed, and the new network-based methods, where too many recombinations are allowed. The methods I propose are simple extensions of well-known approaches for tree reconstruction: maximum parsimony and distance methods. The two approaches differ for the optimality criterion used to score networks, but they have in common the fact that they impose a constraint on the number of recombinations allowed. Maximum parsimony scores networks on the basis of the number of sequence changes needed to explain the input sequences. On the other hand, distance methods score networks on the basis of how well they fit a collection of distance matrices given in input. In both cases, the optimization problems involved are likely to be computationally hard and therefore I plan to attack them using heuristics.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences biological morphology comparative morphology
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology virology
- natural sciences biological sciences evolutionary biology
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
- natural sciences computer and information sciences artificial intelligence heuristic programming
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF
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Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
75794 PARIS
France
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.