12th annual Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop

The MEEP Lab recently hosted the 12th annual Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop on 29–30 July. This was a free online workshop that provided an introduction to phylogenetic analysis using maximum-likelihood and Bayesian methods.

The workshop had 130 attendees from 21 countries, representing every habitable continent. The attendees included about 90 research students.

Workshop lectures were given by MEEP Lab members Yasmin Asar, Simon Ho, Fred Jaya, and Mezzalina Vankan. In addition, Minh Bui (Australian National University) gave an introduction to his software IQ-TREE and David Duchêne (University of Copenhagen) gave a lecture on calibrating molecular clocks.

Day 1 of the workshop covered interpreting phylogenetic trees, molecular data, evolutionary models, and phylogenetic methods, and maximum-likelihood analysis using MEGA and IQ-TREE. Day 2 provided an introduction to Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using BEAST2 and included MCMC sampling, molecular dating, and phylogenomics (using ASTRAL).