Emerging Mathematical Frontiers in Molecular Evolution

One of the main tasks in phylogenomics is the reconstruction of detailed evolutionary scenarios of taxa (e.g. species) and underlying entities (e.g. genes, genomic markers or parasites) that evolve alongside these taxa. While the history of such taxa can be described independently from the history of the underlying entities, only a detailed scenario (i.e., a reconciliation between these histories) can provide a full picture of evolution. In particular, such full scenarios provide a framework to understand the evolutionary dependencies of the underlying taxa and the considered entities in more detail; a task that is crucial for a deeper understanding of the behavior of tumors, the evolution of viruses, the understanding of drug resistance in bacteria forced by horizontal gene transfer and many more.

Many methods that deal with the latter type of problem have been investigated in the past. Although numerous deep results have been established over the years, much remains to be done due to the increasing amount of data and the exciting challenges they pose for mathematical phylogenomics. To make the next step in addressing these challenges and to be able to design powerful mathematical approaches and algorithms we need new ways to combine approaches and techniques from seemingly unrelated areas including combinatorics, algebra or statistics.

The aim of this conference is to bring together both renowned experts and promising young scientists working in mathematical phylogenomics. We envisage this event as an opportunity to explore new links between different mathematical fields for phylogenomics. This will help assessing what these fields can bring to each other, a prelude to the development of hybrid methods aimed at tackling current and future problems raised by the study of genomics and evolution.