Material Detail

This stie has two java simulations for creating evoultionary trees based on discrete characters and a tutorial showing how to use them to investigate the problem of recreating the evolutionary history of species using phylogenetic trees and some simple tree building approaches. One simulation creates random trees by mutating discrete characters. the default is forty characters with 4 possible states, which would model a forty nucleotide sequence. These numbers are all under user control, as is the number of species in the tree. The second program uses one of three simple grouping methods and the character states of the final species to recreate the phylogenetic tree. The user can compare the tree produced by these algorithms to the the actual tree the data is based on to see which method best captures the original phylogeny.

Disciplines:

• Science and Technology  / Biology  / Evolutionary Biology