Authors of original unit: Gloria Rendon

Partner Projects: Biology Student Workbench

Grade Level: Freshman students in Life Sciences

Subject Areas: Evolution, Phylogenetics, Sequence alignment

Unit Keywords: Evolution, Phylogenetics, Sequence alignment, Biology Workbench, CLustalW, DRAWGRAM

Phylogenetic trees are used to introduce concepts of evolution in the classroom. A number of algorithms are now available to automate the construction of phylogenetic trees; however, there is a need to explain how these algorithms work. In this unit we provide such background and illustrate the process by asking students to do it by hand before attempting to do it with the tools.

Intened for college students, who wish to study phylogeny with computational tools.

Web browser (preferably Firefox), Javascript-enabled.

Introduction: background information on phylogeny and evolution.

Part 1: Introduction to reading phylogenetic trees.

Part 2: Constructing phylogenetic trees by hand.

Part 3: Constructing phylogenetic trees with the Biology Workbench.