Jaime Huerta-Cepas is a postdoc researcher within the Comparative Genomics group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation>, headed by Toni Gabaldón. He got his PhD on human genome evolution [1] and large scale phylogentic analyses at the "Universidad Autónoma de Madrid" in 2008. Jaime is the main developer of the phylomeDB database [2], and the ETE toolkit [3]. His work focuses on applying large scale phylogenetic analyses to address different biological problems, such as understanding gene duplication, the evolution of gene expression, functional genome annotation, orthology and paralogy prediction, and the reconstruction of species Tree of Life.

Marina Marcet-Houben obtained her degree in Biochemistry in the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Spain) she presented her diploma in advanced studies in the evolutionary genomics group at the same university. She is currently a last year PhD student in the Comparative Genomics lab at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. Her main research interests are related to the use of large scale phylogenomics tools on the evolution of fungi [4] as well as in studies involving the robustness of species trees [5]. Marina is an active collaborator in the phylomeDB project and the main developer of TreeKo, a tool for comparing phylogenetic tree topologies.

Course attendees are expected to have basic programming skills (not necessarily in Python, although it is recommended*). All exercises will consist on developing Python scripts to perform different analysis on phylogenetic trees using the ETE toolkit on a GNU/Linux environment.

*Important Note: NO introduction to Python programming is scheduled in the course. However, Python is a very intuitive language that can be learned quickly when you have programmed in other languages. As a reference, Chapters 3-7 and 9 from this tutorial would be more than enough to follow the whole course.