Shared Interest Groups

 

In the last meeting we touched on measures of phylogenetic beta diversity and their application to determining phylogenetic signal in trait data. A related problem is the inference of co-adaptation or the identification of phenotypic traits that are consistently correlated throughout evolution. Several comparative methods have been proposed to assess the phenotypic correlation between groups of traits while accounting for shared evolutionary history through phylogenetic trees. I will cover some recent approaches that account for phylogenetic uncertainty and that enable us to consider combinations of different trait data types (continuous, binary, ordered or unordered discrete). I’ll include some examples from the literature and from analyses I’ve conducted with influenza viruses.