Institution

Abstract:

In the past the inference of phylogenetic relationships among animals and plants was exclusively based on morphology. Nowadays molecular data are becoming more and more important and provide a new way to study relationships which is independent of the study of morphological traits. Large sets of molecular data are created in relatively short time and need to be analyses. In recent years there has been a lot of progress in the analysis of sequence data using newly developed methods and procedures, in particular applying the bayesian approach which derived from maximum likelihood methods. Many of those methods are computationally very demanding and the time needed for the analysis of large data sets increases exponentially with the size of the set. The analysis of those data in a reasonable time frame is greatly enhanced by access to high performance computing.