"In biology, phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups of organisms."
The study of the evolutionary history and relationships among groups of organisms.
Taxonomy: The science of describing, naming, and classifying organisms based on their characteristics.
Systematics: The study of the evolutionary relationships among organisms, including both their historical connections and the mechanisms underlying these connections.
Phylogenetics: The use of molecular or morphological data to construct evolutionary trees and infer the relationships among organisms.
Molecular evolution: The study of the patterns and mechanisms of genetic change over time, including the use of DNA sequences to reconstruct evolutionary relationships.
Biogeography: The study of the distribution of organisms across geographic regions and the processes that have shaped these patterns, including historical events such as speciation and dispersal.
Cladistics: An approach to systematics that emphasizes the identification of clades, groups of organisms that share a common ancestor.
Maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods: Statistical approaches to phylogenetic inference that aim to find the most likely explanation for the observed data given a particular model of evolution.
Node support: Measures of statistical confidence in particular branching patterns of evolutionary trees, such as the bootstrap and posterior probability.
Ancestral character state reconstruction: The inference of the likely characteristics of common ancestors of a group of organisms based on the characteristics of their descendants.
Rates of molecular evolution: The variation in the rate at which different genes or regions of the genome evolve, and the factors that underlie this variation.
Cladistics: A method of grouping species according to their evolutionary relationships based on shared features, also known as synapomorphies.
Phylogeography: The study of the historical processes that have shaped the geographic distribution of populations and species.
Molecular Phylogenetics: The use of DNA or RNA sequences to reconstruct the evolutionary history of lineages and populations.
Ecological Phylogenetics: The study of how ecological interactions and environmental factors impact the evolution of species and their relationships.
Biogeography: The study of the spatial distribution of organisms, how it has changed over time, and the historical processes that have shaped it.
Comparative Phylogenetics: The use of comparative methods to test hypotheses about trait evolution in species and populations with phylogenetic trees.
Bayesian Phylogenetics: A statistical approach that uses Bayesian inference techniques to estimate evolutionary relationships among species.
Maximum Likelihood Phylogenetics: A statistical approach that uses likelihood-based methods to estimate the most likely evolutionary tree given a dataset.
Historical Biogeography: The study of the temporal and geographical patterns of diversification and extinction across lineages and regions.
Coalescent-Based Phylogenetics: A statistical approach that models the distribution of gene genealogies within and between species to infer their evolutionary relationships.
"These relationships are determined by phylogenetic inference methods that focus on observed heritable traits, such as DNA sequences, protein amino acid sequences, or morphology."
"The result of such an analysis is a phylogenetic tree—a diagram containing a hypothesis of relationships that reflects the evolutionary history of a group of organisms."
"The tips of a phylogenetic tree can be living taxa or fossils, and represent the 'end' or the present time in an evolutionary lineage."
"A rooted tree diagram indicates the hypothetical common ancestor of the tree. An unrooted tree diagram (a network) makes no assumption about the ancestral line, and does not show the origin or 'root' of the taxa in question or the direction of inferred evolutionary transformations."
"Such uses have become central to understanding biodiversity, evolution, ecology, and genomes."
"Phylogenetics is a component of systematics that uses similarities and differences of the characteristics of species to interpret their evolutionary relationships and origins."
"In the field of cancer research, phylogenetics can be used to study the clonal evolution of tumors and molecular chronology, predicting and showing how cell populations vary throughout the progression of the disease and during treatment."
"The evolutionary processes behind cancer progression are quite different from those in species and are important to phylogenetic inference; these differences manifest in at least four areas: the types of aberrations that occur, the rates of mutation, the intensity, and high heterogeneity - variability - of tumor cell subclones."
"Phylogenetics allows scientists to organize species and can show which species are likely to have inherited particular traits that are medically useful, such as producing biologically active compounds."
"For example, in drug discovery, venom-producing animals are particularly useful. Venoms from these animals produce several important drugs, e.g., ACE inhibitors and Prialt (Ziconotide)."
"In forensic science, phylogenetic tools are useful to assess DNA evidence for court cases."
"HIV forensics uses phylogenetic analysis to track the differences in HIV genes and determine the relatedness of two samples."
"HIV forensics does have its limitations, i.e., it cannot be the sole proof of transmission between individuals and phylogenetic analysis, which shows transmission relatedness, does not indicate direction of transmission."