On Friday, April 7, 2023 VIAN-IT’s webinar was held with the topic “Phylogenetic inference for pandemic-scale data” presented by Dr. Hoang Thi Diep from the University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University-Hanoi.
Dr. Diep Hoang presented her research on bioinformatics, which has been cited more than 4400 times by molecular biologists. Her research developed a heuristic algorithm for an NP-hard problem of finding a phylogenetic tree with a minimum number of point mutations. A phylogenetic tree is a binary tree that shows the lines of evolutionary descent of different species from a common ancestor.
The problem of reconstructing phylogenetic trees from gene sequences has been applied intensively during the COVID-19 pandemic to find the evolutionary relationship among variants of the coronavirus. Dr Diep Hoang’s software, which implements her algorithm, therefore has become popular since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scholars interested in the webinar can rewatch here: