Phylogenetics

"In biology, phylogenetics is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups of organisms."

"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."