Publication details

Publications

A Complex Network Approach to Phylogenetic Trees: From Genes to the Tree of Life

Herrada, E.A. (Directors: Emilio Hernández-García, Víctor M. Eguíluz and Carlos M. Duarte.)
PhD Thesis , (2011)

The increasing interest during the last century in the study and comprehension of the evolutionary processes that govern biodiversity, together with the huge expansion that the complex network approach has undergone in the last decade, has motivated us to address the interrelation of both scientific fields. In that sense, within the context of complex network theory, the main purpose of this work has been to provide new tools for the topological characterization of evolutionary trees, as well as to contribute to enlarging the knowledge of the evolutionary patterns depicted in them. Thereby, we have proposed an approach based on the depth scaling analysis of phylogenetic trees in order to carry out comparative studies between micro- and macroevolutionary phylogenies, gene and species evolutionary trees, as well as a comparative study of the effects of the rank-based and rank-free taxonomic criteria over the topology of evolutionary trees. Besides, we have examined the information stored in the branch length of the phylograms, in order to characterize the branch length distribution along the Tree of Life.

The datasets analyzed in this thesis have been compiled in the URL http://ifisc.uib-csic.es/~alejandro/phylotreedata/, also available at http://ifisc.uib-csic.es/eden/phylotreedata/