Society of Systematic Biologists

Systematics is the study of biological diversity and its origins. It focuses on understanding evolutionary relationships among organisms, species, higher taxa, or other biological entities, such as genes, and the evolution of the properties of taxa including intrinsic traits, ecological interactions, and geographic distributions. An important part of systematics is the development of methods for various aspects of phylogenetic inference and biological nomenclature/classification.

The objective of the Society of Systematic Biologists is the advancement of the science of systematic biology in all its aspects of theory, principles, methodology, and practice, for both living and fossil organisms, with emphasis on areas of common interest to all systematic biologists regardless of individual specialization.

Books recently reviewed in Systematic Biology, or written by members of the Society.

Baird Auditorium
National Museum of Natural History
Washington, DC
Sunday May 20, 2012, 9 AM to 5 PM

TOPICS and SPEAKERS

• Introduction and Welcome to the Smithsonian Jonathan Coddington, Associate Director of Research and Collections, NMNH
• An Overview of Multiple Sequence Alignment Methods Kazutaka Katoh, IFReC, Osaka University, Japan; CBRC, AIST, Japan.
• Phylogenomics Across the Green Plant Tree of Life Jim Leebens-Mack, University of Georgia
• Bayesian Co-estimation of Alignment and Phylogeny Ben Redelings, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCENT)
• Phylogeny-aware Progressive Sequence Alignment Ari Löytynoja, Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, Finland
• SATe: Simultaneous Alignment and Tree Estimation for Large Datasets Tandy Warnow, University of Texas at Austin
• Fast and Accurate Multiple Sequence/Structure Alignment Using MAFFTash Daron Standley, Systems Immunology Lab, Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC), Osaka University
• A Simple Insertion-­Deletion Mixture Model for Phylogenetic Inference Derrick Zwickl, University of Arizona
• Impact of DNA Sequence Alignment on Estimates of the Avian Tree of Life Michael Braun, National Museum of Natural History

Registration is free but required. Please send name, affiliation, e-mail and phone number to Sarah Kingston (kingstons 'at' si.edu).

The organizing committee is pleased to announce the 3rd Moscow international conference on molecular phylogenetics, «Molecular Phylogenetics MolPhy-3», which will take place at the New School Building of Moscow State University, 31 July - 4 August 2012.

The conference mission is to provide a stimulating platform for the exchange of ideas and experiences in contemporary phylogenetics, molecular evolution and bioinformatics, and for developing methodology, algorithms, and applications for state-of-the-art analyses of molecular genetic data. The primary scope is in molecular phylogenetics and systematics, phyloinformatics, evolutionary genomics, reconstructing the Tree of Life, and applied phylogenetics.

The Laboratory of Herpetology of the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo seeks a highly motivated scientist with experience in molecular biology and genetics to receive a 24 month FAPESP Postdoctoral Fellowship (monthly salary: R$ 5,333.40, relocation funding available; for more information visit http://www.fapesp.br/en/5427). The successful applicant will employ next generation sequencing methods to produce large amounts of genomic data to study the colonization processes of snakes species in the insular formations of the Galapagos Archipelago, Brazilian continental islands, Lesser Antilles, and Baja California as part of the project “Origin and evolution of snakes and their diversification in the Neotropics: a multidisciplinary approach,” which aims to investigate the systematics, phylogeny, ecology, and biogeography of Neotropical snakes.

The iEvoBio 2012 Challenge has been announced, and the topic is synthesizing phylogenies. The task:

Somewhere, buried in large sets of trees, lies a stunning new revelation, a baffling discovery, the answer to a longstanding controversy, or simply something not obvious to the naked eye. The mission of the 2012 iEvoBio challenge is to find those revelations, discoveries and answers within your own data and/or within one of the datasets provided by the challenge. What new scientifically interesting results can you pull from these trees, using any combination of techniques at your disposal?

We are pleased to announce the São Paulo School of Advanced Sciences - Evolution (SPSAS-evo) to be held in August 19-31, 2012, in Ilhabela, São Paulo, Brazil. This is the 6th edition of an ambitious initiative by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), whose main purpose is to bring together leading experts and outstanding students/post-docs from all over the world in order to advance areas considered strategic for Brazilian science.

SPSAS-evo will be a two-week course centered on a range of topics in Evolutionary Biology taught by a host of world class experts conducting cutting-edge research in Evolution. The main goals are to generate authoritative outreach material focused on Evolution and to showcase ongoing research in São Paulo, aiming at attracting the most promising students, post-docs and young faculty to the state of São Paulo.