Sarah Otto

University of British Columbia, Department of Zoology

hosted by Magnus Nordborg

ABSTRACT:

The phylogenetic tree of a group of species contains information about character transitions and about diversification processes.  I will describe a likelihood approach (BiSSE) that we have developed to integrate over all possible evolutionary histories to infer the speciation and extinction rates for species with different character states. This method can be used to disentangle whether a particular character state is rare because species in that state are prone to extinction, are unlikely to speciate, or tend to move out of that state faster than they move in.  While inferences from any one clade are subject to chance associations, I discuss applications of these methods to large-scale datasets to address the impact that polyploidy and dioecy have had on plant evolution.