Department of Bioinformatics and Genetics

Parasites are known to exert strong selection pressures on their hosts and, as such, favour the evolution of defence mechanisms. The negative impact of parasites on their host can have substantial consequences in terms of population persistence and the epidemiology of the infection. In natural populations, however, it is difficult to assess the cost of infection while controlling for other

MrBayes is a program for the Bayesian inference of phylogeny. This manual explains Bayesian inference of phylogeny and how to use the program. The program has a command-line interface and should run on a variety of computer platforms. Note that the computer should have a ...

Recent years have seen a rapid expansion of the model space explored in statistical phylogenetics, emphasizing the need for new approaches to statistical model representation and software development. Clear communication and representation of the chosen model is crucial for: (i) reproducibility of an analysis, (ii) model development, and (iii) software design. Moreover, a unified, clear and understandable framework for model representation lowers the barrier for beginners and nonspecialists to grasp complex phylogenetic models, including their assumptions and parameter/variable dependencies. Graphical modeling is a unifying framework that has gained in popularity in the statistical literature in recent years. The core idea is to break complex models into conditionally independent distributions. The strength lies in the comprehensibility, flexibility, and adaptability of this formalism, and the large body of computational work based on it. Graphical models are well-suited to teach st...

MorphBank, an on-line museum quality collection of bi- ological images, is an NSF funded project designed to facil- itate the on-line collaboration of biologists from around the world (3). This paper presents a methodology for the cre- ation of an annotation tool for on-line collaboration and sharing of heterogeneous data through a common medium. The annotation tool combines the advantages