Tree of life

This course was organized and lectured by Professor Mikkel Schierup, and I was the Teaching Assistant for three consecutive years.

The course introduces the students to a wide range of methods for reconstructing phyologenetic trees and use these trees to infer evolutionary patterns including natural selection. They will also learn basic concepts in population genetics including both prospective and retrospective approaches and how these can be inferred to understand the evolutionary processes in population including population demography, recombination and selection. These two fields are then integrated inmodels that consider both intra nd inter specific variation. Application areas will include inferring human evolution, primate evolutionary hioistory, virus evolution, the complete tree of life, inferring selection for new functions. This will also be through reading and discussion of primary scientific publications and students will get familar with main programs of phylogenetic analysis and with exercise in population genetics analysis using R.