Katharina T. Huber

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Katharina Theresia Huber (born 1965) [1] is a German applied mathematician and mathematical biologist whose research concerns phylogenetic trees, evolutionary analysis, their mathematical foundations, and their mathematical visualization. She is an associate professor in the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and the school's director of postgraduate research. [2]

Contents

Education and career

Huber completed a doctorate in mathematics at Bielefeld University in 1997. Her dissertation, A T-theoretical Approach to Phylogenetic Analysis and Cluster Analysis, was jointly supervised by Andreas Dress and Walter Deuber. [3]

After postdoctoral research at Massey University in New Zealand, Huber became a lecturer in mathematics at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden in 2000. She moved to the Department of Biometry and Engineering of the Uppsala University in Sweden in 2003, and to the School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia in 2004, where she became a senior lecturer in 2012. [2]

Contributions

Huber is a coauthor of the book Basic Phylogenetic Combinatorics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), [4] and a codeveloper of the ape package for evolutionary analysis in the R statistical programming system. [5]

Her other research publications include:

Related Research Articles

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A phylogenetic tree is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. All life on Earth is part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sequence homology</span> Shared ancestry between DNA, RNA or protein sequences

Sequence homology is the biological homology between DNA, RNA, or protein sequences, defined in terms of shared ancestry in the evolutionary history of life. Two segments of DNA can have shared ancestry because of three phenomena: either a speciation event (orthologs), or a duplication event (paralogs), or else a horizontal gene transfer event (xenologs).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Substitution model</span> Description of the process by which states in sequences change into each other and back

In biology, a substitution model, also called models of DNA sequence evolution, are Markov models that describe changes over evolutionary time. These models describe evolutionary changes in macromolecules represented as sequence of symbols. Substitution models are used to calculate the likelihood of phylogenetic trees using multiple sequence alignment data. Thus, substitution models are central to maximum likelihood estimation of phylogeny as well as Bayesian inference in phylogeny. Estimates of evolutionary distances are typically calculated using substitution models. Substitution models are also central to phylogenetic invariants because they are necessary to predict site pattern frequencies given a tree topology. Substitution models are also necessary to simulate sequence data for a group of organisms related by a specific tree.

A phylogenetic network is any graph used to visualize evolutionary relationships between nucleotide sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, or species. They are employed when reticulation events such as hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, or gene duplication and loss are believed to be involved. They differ from phylogenetic trees by the explicit modeling of richly linked networks, by means of the addition of hybrid nodes instead of only tree nodes. Phylogenetic trees are a subset of phylogenetic networks. Phylogenetic networks can be inferred and visualised with software such as SplitsTree, the R-package, phangorn, and, more recently, Dendroscope. A standard format for representing phylogenetic networks is a variant of Newick format which is extended to support networks as well as trees.

Computational phylogenetics is the application of computational algorithms, methods, and programs to phylogenetic analyses. The goal is to assemble a phylogenetic tree representing a hypothesis about the evolutionary ancestry of a set of genes, species, or other taxa. For example, these techniques have been used to explore the family tree of hominid species and the relationships between specific genes shared by many types of organisms.

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Ancestral reconstruction is the extrapolation back in time from measured characteristics of individuals to their common ancestors. It is an important application of phylogenetics, the reconstruction and study of the evolutionary relationships among individuals, populations or species to their ancestors. In the context of evolutionary biology, ancestral reconstruction can be used to recover different kinds of ancestral character states of organisms that lived millions of years ago. These states include the genetic sequence, the amino acid sequence of a protein, the composition of a genome, a measurable characteristic of an organism (phenotype), and the geographic range of an ancestral population or species. This is desirable because it allows us to examine parts of phylogenetic trees corresponding to the distant past, clarifying the evolutionary history of the species in the tree. Since modern genetic sequences are essentially a variation of ancient ones, access to ancient sequences may identify other variations and organisms which could have arisen from those sequences. In addition to genetic sequences, one might attempt to track the changing of one character trait to another, such as fins turning to legs.

Bayesian inference of phylogeny combines the information in the prior and in the data likelihood to create the so-called posterior probability of trees, which is the probability that the tree is correct given the data, the prior and the likelihood model. Bayesian inference was introduced into molecular phylogenetics in the 1990s by three independent groups: Bruce Rannala and Ziheng Yang in Berkeley, Bob Mau in Madison, and Shuying Li in University of Iowa, the last two being PhD students at the time. The approach has become very popular since the release of the MrBayes software in 2001, and is now one of the most popular methods in molecular phylogenetics.

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NeighborNet is an algorithm for constructing phylogenetic networks which is loosely based on the neighbor joining algorithm. Like neighbor joining, the method takes a distance matrix as input, and works by agglomerating clusters. However, the NeighborNet algorithm can lead to collections of clusters which overlap and do not form a hierarchy, and are represented using a type of phylogenetic network called a splits graph. If the distance matrix satisfies the Kalmanson combinatorial conditions then Neighbor-net will return the corresponding circular ordering. The method is implemented in the SplitsTree and R/Phangorn packages.

T-REX is a freely available web server, developed at the department of Computer Science of the Université du Québec à Montréal, dedicated to the inference, validation and visualization of phylogenetic trees and phylogenetic networks. The T-REX web server allows the users to perform several popular methods of phylogenetic analysis as well as some new phylogenetic applications for inferring, drawing and validating phylogenetic trees and networks.

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References

  1. Birth year from Library of Congress catalog entry, retrieved 2022-03-05
  2. 1 2 "Katharina Huber", People, University of East Anglia, retrieved 2022-03-05
  3. Katharina T. Huber at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. Reviews of Basic Phylogenetic Combinatorics:
  5. Popescu, Andrei-Alin; Huber, Katharina T.; Paradis, Emmanuel (April 2012), "ape 3.0: New tools for distance-based phylogenetics and evolutionary analysis in R", Bioinformatics, 28 (11): 1536–1537, doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts184 , PMID   22495750