Ressource pédagogique : 5.1. The tree of life

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Description (résumé)

Welcome to this fifth and last week of our course on genomes and algorithms that is the computer analysis of genetic information. During this week, we will firstsee what phylogenetic trees are and how we can reconstruct these trees from the available data. Then to conclude this week and this course, we will present an overview, a larger overview of bioinformatic algorithms and we will conclude on the application of bioinformatics at least in the microbial world. So first the tree of life, we have already seen that due to the ideas of Darwin, we know that species evolve and the evolution of these species canbe seen as a tree. Each note of the tree is aspecies, there are some specific events which are called speciation when one species evolves into two different species and so on. Over time new species appeared and we have at the leaves of the tree the species which are known presently. The problem here is: is it possible to reconstruct the phylogenetic tree of a set of species knowing that we have at our disposal only the data on what we see now? We have to reconstruct a story using the available information and data. The answer is Yes, of course, we have no mean to be sure that the tree we will reconstruct isthe real one but we can make assumptions, hypothesis and usealgorithms to build phylogenetic trees from available information. Two classes of information can beused, the so-called phenotypic information, that is to say, the phenotype is what we see of a living system. The aspect of it, its characteristic, anatomy and so on.

"Domaine(s)" et indice(s) Dewey

• biologie application informatique (570.285)

Thème(s)