This is the first book on "phylogenetic supertrees", a recent, but controversial development for inferring evolutionary trees. Rather than analyze the combined primary character data directly, supertree construction proceeds by combining the tree topologies derived from those data. This difference in strategy has allowed for the exciting possibility of larger, more complete phylogenies than are otherwise currently possible, with the potential to revolutionize evolutionarily-based research. This book provides a comprehensive look at supertrees, ranging from the methods used to build supertrees to the significance of supertrees to bioinformatic and biological research. Reviews of many the major supertree methods are provided and four new techniques, including a Bayesian implementation of supertrees, are described for the first time. The far-reaching impact of supertrees on biological research is highlighted both in general terms and through specific examples from diverse clades such as flowering plants, even-toed ungulates, and primates. The book also critically examines the many outstanding challenges and problem areas for this relatively new field, showing the way for supertree construction in the age of genomics. Interdisciplinary contributions from the majority of the leading authorities on supertree construction in all areas of the bioinformatic community (biology, computer sciences, and mathematics) will ensure that this book is a valuable reference with wide appeal to anyone interested in phylogenetic inference.

To document the world's diversity of species and reconstruct the tree of life we need to undertake some simple but mountainous tasks. Most importantly, we need to tackle species rich groups. We need to collect, name, and classify them, and then position them on the tree of life. We need to do this systematically across all groups of organisms and b

The Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference is an annual forum for exploring research, development, and novel applications of computing and combinatorics. It brings together researchers, professionals and industrial practitioners to interact and exchange knowledge, ideas and progress. Thetopics covermost aspects oftheoreticalcomputer scienceand combinatorics related to computing. The 13th Annual International Computing and Com- natorics Conference (COCOON 2007) was held in Ban?, Alberta during July 16–19, 2007. This was the ?rst time that COCOON was held in Canada. We received 165 submissions, among which 11 were withdrawn for various reasons. The remaining 154 submissions under full consideration came from 33 countries and regions: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, R- sia, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, the USA, and the US minor outlying islands. Afterasixweekperiodofcarefulreviewinganddiscussions,theprogramc- mittee accepted 51 submissions for oral presentation at the conference. Based on the a?liations, 1. 08 of the accepted papers were from Australia, 7. 67 from Canada, 3. 08 from China, 1 from the Czech Republic, 2 from Denmark, 1 from France, 5. 42 from Germany, 0. 08 from Greece, 2. 18 from Hong Kong, 0. 33 from India, 0. 17 from Ireland, 1. 83 from Israel, 1. 5fromItaly,2. 9 from Japan, 0. 17 from the Netherlands, 2. 67 from Norway, 0.

This book presents the foundations of phylogeny estimation and technical material enabling researchers to develop improved computational methods.

The refereed proceedings of the 11th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference, COCOON 2005, held in Kunming, China in August 2005. The 96 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 353 submissions. The papers cover most aspects of theoretical computer science and combinatorics related to computing and are organized in topical sections on bioinformatics, networks, string algorithms, scheduling, complexity, steiner trees, graph drawing and layout design, quantum computing, randomized algorithms, geometry, codes, finance, facility location, graph theory, graph algorithms.

The 7th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA ’99) is held in Prague, Czech Republic, July 16-18, 1999. This continued the tradition of the meetings which were held in – 1993 Bad Honnef (Germany) – 1994 Utrecht (Netherlands) – 1995 Corfu (Greece) – 1996 Barcelona (Spain) – 1997 Graz (Austria) – 1998 Venice (Italy) (The proceedingsof previousESA meetings were publishedas Springer LNCS v- umes 726, 855, 979, 1136, 1284, 1461.) In the short time of its history ESA (like its sister meeting SODA) has become a popular and respected meeting. The call for papers stated that the “Symposium covers research in the use, design, and analysis of ef?cient algorithms and data structures as it is carried out in c- puter science, discrete applied mathematics and mathematical programming. Papers are solicited describing original results in all areas of algorithmic research, including but not limited to: Approximation Algorithms; Combinatorial Optimization; Compu- tional Biology; Computational Geometry; Databases and Information Retrieval; Graph and Network Algorithms; Machine Learning; Number Theory and Computer Algebra; On-line Algorithms; Pattern Matching and Data Compression; Symbolic Computation.