Evolutionary_Thinking_2024

Exercises contents for 2024 Autumn Evolutionary Thinking course, Aarhus University

Bjarke Meyer Pedersen bjarke@birc.au.dk

Janek Sendrowski sendrowski.janek@birc.au.dk


Special Thanks to Moisès Coll Macià who structured the exercise materials and Jilong Ma from whom I forked (stole) the repository.


Outline

Week 1

You don't need to prepare from home

Session 1 Reading the Tree and Installing MEGA

Short Intro

Basic concepts in reading phylogeny trees.

Terminology

Session 2 MEGA exercises - Retrieve Sequences, Alignments, and Distance Matrix

Short review on alignments algorithms

Distance matrix, how do we define "distance"

Week 2

Session 1 Substituion models

Observed pairwise difference and substitutions.

Jukes and Cantor's model and Kimura's model

Paper Discussion: Modeltest: testing the model of DNA substitution

Session 2 MEGA exercises - choosing substitution model and building phylogeny trees.

Distance based phylogeny tree building algorithms - UPGMA and NJ

Finding the best fitted substitution model using MEGA

Building your own phylogeny tree using MEGA.

  • Maximum likelihood
  • Maximum Parsimony
  • Distance based methods

Week 3

Session 1 Molecular clock - dates the time since divergence

How does molecular clock work ?

Calibraton of molecular clock.

Assumptions of molecular clock.

Relaxation for the assumptioms.

Session 2 Handin 1 - Phylogeny Trees

Working on handin 1

Week 4

Session 1 Paper Discussion: HIV transmission in dental practice

Review and practice on the phylogenetics from previous weeks.

HIV transmission paper

Week 5

Session 1 Basis of Population Genetics

Terminology in Population Genetics

Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium

Wright-Fisher model and Genetic Drift

Session 2 Simulations of Wright-Fisher model and coalescence

R exercises

Coalescence Theory

Coalescence time and exponential distribution

Genetic Drift

Genetic drift and population size

Week6

Session 1 Population Subdivision, Demography Inference, LD

Session 2

HER MANGLER NOGET

Week7

Session 1 Selection

Vialility difference and selection coefficient

Type of selections

Trajectories of mutation under selection

Genetic hitchhiking and selection sweep

Methods of selection detection

Session 2 Testing for selection using dn/ds

Week8

Paper discussion on selection

HAND-IN II

Session 2 Work on hand-in II

Week9

Paper discussion on Gene duplication

MEGAX and gene duplication

Session 2 MEGAX exercise

Week10

Paper discussion on the Y-chromosome

R exercise and data from Wednesdays paper by Skov L. Et al.

Session 2 R exercise

Week11

Paper discussion on Phylogenetic incongruences

MEGAX and Incongruences

Session 2 MEGAX exercise

Week12

Paper discussion on Ancient Selection

R exercise and the infamous PCA

Session 2 R exercise

Hand-in-III Hand-in III

Week13

TBA

[Session 1]

TBA

Week14 the last week

Hand-in III correction

[Session 1]

Evaluation and talk about the entire semester (maybe even cake)

[Session 2]