Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with A. Steger, D. Steurer and B. Sudakov)

Date and Time: Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 12:15 pm

Duration: This information is not available in the database

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Bhalchandra D. Thatte (University of Oxford)

Reconstructing Population Pedigrees

The pedigree of a population is a directed acyclic graph that represents the ancestral history of the population. Thus each vertex (individual) in a pedigree has 0 incoming arcs if it is a 'founder' or 2 incoming arcs (from its parents) if it is not a founder. The vertices with no outgoing arcs represent the extant population. I will talk about problems of reconstructing pedigrees.

In the first talk (in Mittagsseminar), I will consider some purely combinatorial questions of reconstruction. I will sketch a construction of non-isomorphic pedigrees that have the same collection of subpedigrees. This problem is closely related to the classical reconstruction problems (of Ulam and Harary) and reconstruction of hypergraphs from their line graphs. I will then discuss my recent attempt to characterizing non-reconstructible pedigrees.

In my second talk (in Ivo Sbalzarini's group), I will discuss the problem of reconstructing a pedigree from sequences observed at extant individuals. We will assume that sequences over an alphabet $\Sigma $ are assigned to the founders, and evolve under an idealized recombination-mutation model. We will then ask the question: does the joint distribution on extant sequences determine the pedigree up to isomorphism? I will present some of my recent work on this problem. There are interesting connections between combinatorial reconstruction problems and the problem of reconstruction from sequences.

Both talks will be mathematical but mostly self contained. No biological background will be assumed.

Upcoming talks     |     All previous talks     |     Talks by speaker     |     Upcoming talks in iCal format (beta version!)

Previous talks by year:   2023  2022  2021  2020  2019  2018  2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009  2008  2007  2006  2005  2004  2003  2002  2001  2000  1999  1998  1997  1996  

Information for students and suggested topics for student talks

Automatic MiSe System Software Version 1.4803M   |   admin login