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Phylogenetics

Phylogenetics#

Topic overview#

Phylogenetic analyses have become central to understanding the evolutionary history, ecology and diversity of life on earth. In this lesson, you will learn about basic concepts of phylogenetic analyses based on DNA sequences. We will show you how to infer the evolutionary relationship of groups of organisms. To this end, we will collect phylogenetically informative sequences and teach you, step-by-step, how to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree via a web-based interface. Furthermore, you will learn how to assign a taxon of interest to an existing phylogenetic tree by command

Learning objectives#

Learning objective 1 - You can generate phylogenetic trees

  • LO 1.1 - You are able to collect DNA and protein sequences of interest and store them them in an adequate format

  • LO 1.2 - You can explain the different steps and know examples of software required to generate phylogenetic trees

  • LO 1.3 - Using phylogenetic trees, you can explain the hypothesised evolutionary relationship between organisms and genes

Learning objective 2 - You can perform taxonomic classification

  • LO 2.1 - You understand 16S/18S rRNA genes as marker genes for investigating evolutionary relationships

  • LO 2.2 - You can extract 16S rRNA genes from genome sequences using barrnap

  • LO 2.3 - You are familiar with the database Microbe Atlas Project for taxonomic identification of microbes

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