STATISTICS
COLLOQUIUM
Thursday, March 1st, 2012 at
4.10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments: 3.30pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium
Room)
Speaker: Bruce Rannala (Genome Center, UC Davis)
Title: A Bayesian Approach to Species Delimitation
Abstract: Taxonomy is an
ancient subject aimed at classifying organisms according to species or higher
level groupings. Morphological (physical) features have been used to identify
species for centuries. However, some taxonomic groups show great morphological
similarities despite their ancient relatedness. This has led to the notion of a
"cryptic" species. Recently, there has been much interest in the identification
of cryptic species using only genomic sequences. I will provide an overview of
a recently developed method that uses a combination of population genetic modeling,
phylogenetic inference theory and Bayesian reversible jump Markov chain Monte
Carlo to assign posterior probabilities to particular species delimitations.
Examples will be presented analyzing sequence data for primates and lizards.
