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

A phylogenetic tree, phylogeny or evolutionary tree is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time. In other words, it 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. In evolutionary biology, all life on Earth is theoretically part of a single phylogenetic tree, indicating common ancestry. Phylogenetics is the study of phylogenetic trees. The main challenge is to find a phylogenetic tree representing optimal evolutionary ancestry between a set of species or taxa. Computational phylogenetics focuses on the algorithms involved in finding optimal phylogenetic tree in the phylogenetic landscape.

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Ancestral reconstruction is the extrapolation back in time from measured characteristics of individuals, populations, or species 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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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