My talk was accepted for the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution conference at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia this June.—Yea! Prof. Steve Steve will be there to see it. How about you? The talk is entitled “Estimating the rate and length distribution of indels”. According to the current schedule, I will be presenting at 12:15 on June 26 in the “Phyloggenetics: methods and models” session. My fellow Thorne-Lab postdoc, Ben Redelings, is also presenting in the same session.
In my talk, I will be presenting results from my current project which uses an expectation-maximization algorithm with a pair-hidden-markov-model to estimate parameters of an indel evolution model from intron sequences, without the need to assume any alignment is the true one.
Two early results that are important for molecular biologists: 1) a power-law gap model is significantly more accurate than the standard affine gap mode; 2) the indel model appears to be conserved across the mammal taxa that I’ve looked at.
Update