Summer school in molecular evolution and diversity

The Summer School will be a course for Postgraduate and Postdoctoral researchers working on quantitative aspects of evolutionary biology, dealing with variation both within and between species. The course is intended for young scientists who take an ongoing and broad interest in molecular evolutionary biology, and wish to gain a greater understanding of quantitative and theoretical tools and approaches that will aid their interpretation of evolutionary data. The central aim is to deepen understanding of the evolutionary principles and concepts needed to work with sequences to study biological questions. The underlying philosophy of the course is that young biologists will increasingly need to use quantitative evolutionary approaches in their research, and that they cannot do this effectively without a good understanding of the theoretical foundations. The course will focus on some of the most important results that are widely used in understanding genetic variability within species, evolutionary change between species, natural selection and how it is detected from DNA sequence data, evolution of gene families and changes in gene function in the evolution of developmental systems, genome evolution and evolution of pathogens. The main content of the course is a set of lectures and computer-based practicals from experts in population genetics and molecular evolutionary analyses, including both people working on developing methods, and people who are applying them to biological data from a range of organisms. The lecturers will be asked to spend at least two days at the course. While covering the range of topics listed above, the lectures form an integrated set, with important concepts appearing in multiple contexts (e.g. population subdivision, and neutral evolution, must be understood when testing for the action of natural selection). The course will include a technical lecture on the principles of DNA and protein sequence alignment, but the lecturer on this topic will also be able to show the close relationship between alignment methods and models of sequence evolution. The course includes an introduction to population genetics theory, and concentrates on a few major results that can be simply derived in lectures, and can be explained and understood intuitively. Reading lists with references to more formal theoretical treatments are supplied, so that students can study further aspects that are most relevant to their very different individual interests. It is very important that students learn to think about biological data sets in a quantitative way, which will help them in a variety of approaches to predictive biology. There will also be computer sessions, intended to help participants learn how to approach analyses of sequence and other data, and to understand about how they can be used in studying biological questions of interest. The course includes a lecture on understanding phylogenetic trees, and tree estimation is included in the computer classes, but the course does not cover this in depth. Equally, there is also a lecture on population structure, but this deals with phylogeographic approaches only in this context, i.e. it aims to communicate the underlying population genetic principles needed for a critical understanding of these approaches, but does not offer training in them. Training in both phylogenetic tree estimation and phylogeographic approaches, including technical training in the use of the relevant software packages, are available in other courses, whereas other courses have little population genetics content. In addition to the lectures, the 'students' chosen for the school present a short talk or a poster about their research project (or planned project). This generates discussions with the lecturers, and the students are able to get technical and other advice in discussions with the lecturers.

The proposed Summer Schools will provide training in the quantitative evolutionary interpretation of molecular datasets from the Biological Sciences. The School will start with some in depth training in quantitative theory dealing with genetic variation within populations and the evolutionary forces that act on this variation and determine its patterns. This will include selection, genetic drift, and recombination, dealt with using coalescent approaches. There will then be a fuller consideration of the impact on genetic variation of the fact that populations are subdivided geographically. There will then be a consideration of the inference of phylogeny from DNA sequences, including alignment methodologies. These underlying principles of evolutionary explanation will then be applied to two areas of great current interest, specifically the evolutionary interpretation of variation in development, and the evolution of microorganisms. The lecture course will be supplemented by a series of computer practicals. The intention is to use software that will characterise genetic variation between populations, will use this to infer phylogeny, and to search for the impact of natural selection. Further software packages designed to focus on genetic variation within populations will also be included. Thus, programs such as MEGA, PAML and DNAsp are likely to feature, or may be replaced by newer software developed in the course of the next five years.