Zuckerkandl and Pauling showed 50 years ago that molecular sequences are ‘documents of evolutionary history’. The composition of the molecular sequences of organisms living today has been passed on from ancestors from long ago. Unused segments get lost, new parts are added and small changes occur because replication is not error free. Whatever modifications have happened, they will have left traces in the molecular sequences.

In the advent of next generation sequencing technologies we have thousands of genomes available, however, we lack methods for genome-wide molecular dating.  In this project, we will develop novel methods which will model not only mutations but also processes such as gene duplication, loss and transfer. We will also consider variation within species and devise methods that allow to use the genome-wide DNA sequences of multiple individuals per species to perform molecular dating.