Speaker: Dr Andrew Meade,
AMS, Environmental Biology, University of Reading.
Date/Time: 16th May 2007, 13:00 - 14:00 hrs
Location: Room G74, Philip Lyle Building (Building 32), Whiteknights Campus.
Map: http://www.info.rdg.ac.uk/maps/maps-display.asp
Abstract:
One of the main areas of this group’s work is to develop statistical methods for using gene-sequences to deduce the history of life and the evolutionary trends that have produced the diversity of organisms we see today. The group has developed methods to infer what are known as ‘phylogenies’ or family trees of organisms. These trees are like a family tree that one might draw for a real biological family, but instead they describe the patterns of descent among a group of related species. It is from these trees that we can establish, for example, that humans share a more recent common ancestor with chimpanzees than they do with gorillas, or that the living bird species descend from dinosaurs. Similar methods can be used to make guesses about the most likely ancestral features of organisms - what they were like in the past - or the ancestral features of specific genes or proteins. Recent work from Mark’s group, published in the journal Nature, was able to show that dinosaurs had developed bird-like genetic characteristics long before the origin of birds. Other recent work has shown that many animal and plant species evolve in rapid bursts of change at the time of speciation before settling into longer periods of gradual change.
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