Survey of molecular phylogenetics

Abstract

Rapidly increasing amount of biological data necessarily requires techniques that would enable to extract the information hidden in the data. Methods of molecular phylogenetics are commonly used tools as well as objects of continuous research within many fields, such as evolutionary biology, systematics, epidemiology, genomics, etc. The evolutionary process not only determines relationships among species, but also allows prediction of structural, physiological and biochemical properties of biomolecules. The article provides the reader with a brief overview of common methods that are currently employed in the field of molecular phylogenetics.

Keywords

• evolutionary model
• distance-based methods
• maximum parsimony
• maximum likelihood
• bayesian inference
• accuracy of phylogeny