| This fund supports research is in the areas of computational biology and molecular evolutionary genetics, and includes examination of patterns and processes of sequence evolution to understand molecular evolutionary mechanisms that bring about biological change. The basis for much of the research is comparative and includes several levels of biological organization. In addition to answering specific biological questions, a substantial portion of research has focused on experimental design and data analysis methods. Some of this work has involved examination of the sampling properties of DNA sequence data for evolutionary inference, sampling of genetic diversity in relationship to conservation reserve design, comparison of maximum likelihood bootstrap and Bayesian posterior probability values, hypothesis testing using tree-based statistical models, and more recently genetic differentiation. |