This is the first book on "phylogenetic supertrees", a recent, but controversial development for inferring evolutionary trees. Rather than analyze the combined primary character data directly, supertree construction proceeds by combining the tree topologies derived from those data. This difference in strategy has allowed for the exciting possibility of larger, more complete phylogenies than are otherwise currently possible, with the potential to revolutionize evolutionarily-based research. This book provides a comprehensive look at supertrees, ranging from the methods used to build supertrees to the significance of supertrees to bioinformatic and biological research. Reviews of many the major supertree methods are provided and four new techniques, including a Bayesian implementation of supertrees, are described for the first time. The far-reaching impact of supertrees on biological research is highlighted both in general terms and through specific examples from diverse clades such as flowering plants, even-toed ungulates, and primates. The book also critically examines the many outstanding challenges and problem areas for this relatively new field, showing the way for supertree construction in the age of genomics. Interdisciplinary contributions from the majority of the leading authorities on supertree construction in all areas of the bioinformatic community (biology, computer sciences, and mathematics) will ensure that this book is a valuable reference with wide appeal to anyone interested in phylogenetic inference.

Phylogenetic comparative approaches are powerful analytical tools for making evolutionary inferences from interspecific data and phylogenies. The phylogenetic toolkit available to evolutionary biologists is currently growing at an incredible speed, but most methodological papers are published in the specialized statistical literature and many are incomprehensible for the user community. This textbook provides an overview of several newly developed phylogenetic comparative methods that allow to investigate a broad array of questions on how phenotypic characters evolve along the branches of phylogeny and how such mechanisms shape complex animal communities and interspecific interactions. The individual chapters were written by the leading experts in the field and using a language that is accessible for practicing evolutionary biologists. The authors carefully explain the philosophy behind different methodologies and provide pointers – mostly using a dynamically developing online interface – on how these methods can be implemented in practice. These “conceptual” and “practical” materials are essential for expanding the qualification of both students and scientists, but also offer a valuable resource for educators. Another value of the book are the accompanying online resources (available at: http://www.mpcm-evolution.com), where the authors post and permanently update practical materials to help embed methods into practice.

These proceedings contain papers from the 2009 Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during September 12–13, 2009. WABI 2009 was the ninth annual conference in this series, which focuses on novel algorithms that address imp- tantproblemsingenomics,molecularbiology,andevolution.Theconference- phasizes research that describes computationally e?cient algorithms and data structures that have been implemented and tested in simulations and on real data. WABI is sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical C- puter Science (EATCS) and the International Society for Computational Bi- ogy (ISCB). WABI 2009 was supported by the Penn Genome Frontiers Institute and the Penn Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania. For the 2009 conference, 90 full papers were submitted for review by the Program Committee, and from this strong ?eld of submissions, 34 papers were chosen for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings. The ?nal programcovered a wide range of topics including gene interaction n- works, molecular phylogeny, RNA and protein structure, and genome evolution.

This volume presents a compelling collection of state-of-the-art work in algorithmic computational biology, honoring the legacy of Professor Bernard M.E. Moret in this field. Reflecting the wide-ranging influences of Prof. Moret’s research, the coverage encompasses such areas as phylogenetic tree and network estimation, genome rearrangements, cancer phylogeny, species trees, divide-and-conquer strategies, and integer linear programming. Each self-contained chapter provides an introduction to a cutting-edge problem of particular computational and mathematical interest. Topics and features: addresses the challenges in developing accurate and efficient software for the NP-hard maximum likelihood phylogeny estimation problem; describes the inference of species trees, covering strategies to scale phylogeny estimation methods to large datasets, and the construction of taxonomic supertrees; discusses the inference of ultrametric distances from additive distance matrices, and the inference of ancestral genomes under genome rearrangement events; reviews different techniques for inferring evolutionary histories in cancer, from the use of chromosomal rearrangements to tumor phylogenetics approaches; examines problems in phylogenetic networks, including questions relating to discrete mathematics, and issues of statistical estimation; highlights how evolution can provide a framework within which to understand comparative and functional genomics; provides an introduction to Integer Linear Programming and its use in computational biology, including its use for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem. Offering an invaluable source of insights for computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and statisticians, this illuminating volume will also prove useful for graduate courses on computational biology and bioinformatics.

In this book, leading researchers in the field of Bioinformatics provide a selection of the most useful and widely applicable methods, able to be applied as is, or with minor variations, to many specific problems. Over 80 authors from around the globe contribute to the two volumes, including many leading experts in their respective subjects. They encompass topics from across the diverse field of bioinformatics through its broad scope, combining to provide an inter-disciplinary collaboration involving biologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists.