Recent Progress in Phylogenetic Combinatorics
Date: 30 April 2008 (Wednesday)
Time:12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Venue: L2, Science Centre
Speaker: Prof. Andreas Dress, Director, Chinese Academy of Sciences--Max Planck Institute, Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences
Abstract: Phylogenetic combinatorics deals with the combinatorial aspects of phylogenetic-tree reconstruction. A starting point was the observation that, given a finite collection X of taxa, there is a close relationship between phylogenetic X-trees, certain metrics D defined on X, and weighted compatible systems of X-splits. In my lecture, I will focus on some rather new developments within this context relating to block decomposition and virtual cut points of metric spaces reported in [1] to [4] that allow to canonically decompose any given finite metric space into a sum of pairwise compatible block metrics thus providing a far-reaching generalization of the result referred to above.
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