Luay Nakhleh - Reconstructing Evolution Across Scales: Phylogenomics from Species to Cells

Описание: Since Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolutionary history has been depicted as a simple branching tree. However, modern genomic data reveal that this iconic metaphor is incomplete. From the way species emerge over millions of years to the way a single tumor grows within a patient, evolutionary history is often a messy “forest” of conflicting signals. At the species level, genetic exchange and ancestral quirks mean that different parts of the genome often tell different stories, making it impossible to summarize life’s history with a single, simple diagram.

Similar challenges arise at the microscopic scale, particularly in cancer. As a tumor grows, it evolves, creating a mosaic of cell populations with distinct genetic profiles. By treating a tumor as its own evolving ecosystem, we can use statistical models to reconstruct the life history of a cancer and better understand how it survives and spreads.

This talk spans the full spectrum of evolutionary inference, exploring how we use trees, “trees within trees,” and “trees within networks” to solve problems across scales. We will journey from the species level, where we integrate networks to map the history of life, down to the cellular level, where we map the complex evolution of cancer. Throughout, I will highlight some mathematical models that allow us to unify evolutionary reconstruction across the entire spectrum of biological life.