CMSC 702 meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00-3:15pm in IRB-1207, unless otherwise indicated. The schedule will cover much of the same material from 2024 with some exclusions and additions.

CP = Computational Phylogenetics (Warnow, 2017) [UMD Library]

Week Day Date Class Reading
1 Mon Aug 31 No class - Recorded Lecture
Course overview and logistics [materials]
Some biology basics [materials]
CP Appendix A and B
Wed Sep 2 Guest lecture by Junyan Dai
Is level-1 blob reconstruction under the network multispecies coalescent easy?
[materials]
NetCS paper
2 Mon Sep 7 No class - Labor Day Holiday
Wed Sep 9 Phylogenetic Trees
Rooted trees and clades, unrooted trees and bipartitions, contractions, refinements, homemorphic subtrees, tree error, tree space, compatibility
[materials]
CP Chapter 2
3 Mon Sep 14 Characters and Infinite Sites Model
Character compatibility, perfect phylogeny, homoplasy, single nucleotide variants, infinite sites + noise model, minimum error correction problem, applications in tumor phylogeny [materials]
CP Sections 4.1, 4.2, 4.4
Wed Sep 16 Parsimony
Parsimony criterion scores (Fitch, Dollo, Camin-Sokal, Star Homoplasy), small and large maximum parsimony problems, branch-and-bound, tree space search heuristics (randomized taxon addition, edit moves e.g. NNI, SPR, TBR), consensus trees (may carry over to next Wed) [materials]
CP Sections 4.3, 6.1-6.2
4 Mon Sep 21 Maximum Likelihood and Finite Sites Model
Cavendar-Farris Neyman (CFN) model, Small maximum likelihood (ML) problem (Felsenstein's pruning algorithm), Large ML problem, Statistical (inconsisteny) of parsimony (Felsenstein Zone), Taxon sampling and Long branch attraction [materials]
CP Sections 1.1-1.3, 5.1-5.5.2, 8.8
Wed Sep 24 Finite Sites cont. GTR model, SHR assumptions, site rate heterogeneity, heterotachy, bootstrap
Supertrees Compatibility supertrees, ASSU, All Quartets, supertree optimization problems
[materials]
CP Sections 1.1, Chapter5, Chapter 8
Fri Sep 26 Problem set #1 due today!
5 Mon Sep 28 Distance Methods p-distance, distance correction, additive, ultrametric, Four Point Method, UPGMA, NJ, Balanced Minimum Evolution [materials] CP Chapter 5
Wed Sep 30 Multi-species Coalescent Model TBD
6 Mon Oct 5 Species Tree Reconstruction TBD
Wed Oct 7 Species Network Reconstruction TBD
Fri Oct 9 Problem set #2 due today!
7 Mon Oct 12 No class - UMD Fall Break
Wed Oct 14 Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) TBD
8 Mon Oct 19 From MSA to Whole Genome Alignment (WGA) TBD
Wed Oct 21 Structural Variants
9 Mon Oct 26 Sequence conservation and hidden markov models
Wed Oct 28 ML methods, connection to coalescent, etc
10 Mon Nov 2 Overflow day
Wed Nov 4 Small reading group
11 Mon Nov 9 Large reading group
Wed Nov 11 Exam Review
12 Mon Nov 16 Exam today in class at 2:00pm!
Wed Nov 18
13 Mon Nov 23
Wed Nov 25 No class - Thanksgiving Holiday
14 Mon Nov 30
Wed Dec 2
15 Mon Dec 7
Wed Dec 10
17 Sun Dec 20th Project reports due today at 11:59PM ET!