Erick Matsen and colleagues have organized an online phylogenetics seminar that should be of interest to many Dechronization readers. The stated goals of the seminar series are to provide a forum for the discussion of phylogenetics methodology, disseminate information about ‘best practice’ phylogenetics, and to reduce our carbon footprint by reducing air travel. This seems like a really cool idea and I’m impressed by the present and past lineup of speakers they’ve assembled. I haven’t tuned in yet, but both Marc Suchard and Ward Wheeler gave seminars in the fall – you can view both of their seminars here.I’m looking forward to the next set of seminars, which will include species tree estimation using BEAST. Coming up this Monday, January 25 (1300 PST) is Joseph Heled, who will be talking about “Gene-tree species-tree discordance.” And Noah Rosenberg and Jens Lagergren are on deck to give seminars during February and March. One cool idea that these folks are floating is to allow seminar “attendees” to vote on upcoming seminar topics, and you can email Erick to suggest both potential speakers and topics. Check out the Phyloseminar website for instructions on connecting - seems pretty straightforward and I’ll try and give it a shot today.
6 comments:
Looks very cool. I thought your mention of gene trees into species trees with BEAST was a typo (with BEST being your intention), but then I remembered seeing Heled present on the BEAST method at the evolution meetings last summer. Has anybody used this method?
This is very cool...and finally explains why "phylowebinar" was written on the white board for a month where Ward teaches systematics.
In the v1.5 BEAST, you can unlink topologies across partitions, so I'm assuming this has something to do with it. However, I have not yet explored this and I've heard that there is no documentation for it yet.
I guess the method is the one described here: Bayesian inference of species trees from multilocus data, Joseph Heled and Alexei J. Drummond (MBE advance access). They call it *BEAST (star beast), but I haven't checked it yet.
Now I'm having problems setting up the "evo" platform to join or watch the previous seminar - it seems that I'll have to downgrade Java...
Cool! I'll tune in.
As Leonardo said, it's called *BEAST and BEAST users are already trying it out. For more, check the BEAST Users Group.
We have been using the multi-species coalescent in *BEAST quite a bit. I am finding faster convergence than BEST and a more direct way to include age constraints so the species trees are "dated."
The Heled & Drummond paper is in press at MBE. The Heled phyloseminar was okay, but I did not think that it provided the definitive tutorial for species tree estimation using *BEAST.
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