Symposium number: 27

Title: MOLECULAR SYSTEMATICS AND EVOLUTION

Principal organizer: Dorit Liebers-Helbig
German Oceanographic Museum, Deusches Meeresmuseum, Katharinenberg 14/20, D-18439 Stralsund, Germany
email: dorit.liebers@meeresmuseum.de

Second organizer: Allan J. Baker
Royal Ontario Museum, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, 100 Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C6, Canada

First keynote speaker: Allan J. Baker
Royal Ontario Museum, Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, 100 Queen's Park, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C6, Canada
Title of first keynote paper: Rare genomic events as phylogenetic markers to help resolve the avian tree of life

Second keynote speaker: Glenn-Peter Sætre
CEES, Department of Biology, University of Oslo, P. O. Box 1066, Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
Title of second keynote paper: Sex, genes and speciation - the curious case of the Ficedula flycatchers

Contributed talks

Symposium description: This symposium intends to cover a broad range of topics in molecular systematics. Principal among them are problems associated with the analysis of DNA sequence data, such as biased representation of taxa, conflicting trees for different genes, positive or negative selection acting on certain sites, long branch attraction, and homoplasy at deep phylogenetic levels. Some methods, notably partitioned Bayesian analysis for codon positions or different genes, seem to fit data much better than others, solve many of the above problems, and provide more strongly supported trees. Such approaches largely obviate the old concern about combining disparate gene partitions because each one has the most appropriate model of sequence evolution applied to it before all are combined. Y/R coding in third positions of mtDNA genes also seems to help in overcoming representational bias as well as reducing homoplasy. Because of such methodological advances, the tools are now in place to construct trees of relationship among large numbers of taxa, including a tree of life for birds, within a reasonable time frame. The symposium also aims to include contributed papers addressing molecular aspects of speciation (e.g. ring species model, role of sex-chromosomal loci in the evolution of reproductive isolation) as well as the use of molecular phylogenies in reconstructing character evolution and biogeography.

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