École Nationale Supérieure de
Techniques Avancées

Abstract

Being a tool to study evolution, phylogenetic trees are central in biology. Inferred from sequence data, they permit to visualise and understand the possible evolution of organisms,genes or strains. Then, analysing what parts of sequences (ie which genomic sites) are informative to construct the best phylogenetic tree would be useful: for instance, to use the most relevant sequence data or to suppress non-informative sites to shorten the sequences which can be really long. In this project we want to highlight properties of these informative sites (homoplasy, high/low mutation rate, ...). In order to do it, simulations have been done to simulate evolution along a phylogenetic tree and a function to introduce homoplasy in a tree has been created. These steps precede simulations of phylogenetic trees inferred from sequence data with particular sites removed. These simulations will permit to identify, if some, biological properties of informative sites.