About Phylogenetics

Phylogenetic is the study of phylogeny, or the evolutionary history, development and relationships among groups of organisms (e.g. species, or populations). These are discovered through molecular sequencing data, and morphological data matrices or information about the physical attributes of various species at various times. Phylogenetic trees illustrate the evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms, or among a family of related nucleic acid or protein sequences. Phylogenetic deals mainly with physical or morphological features such as size, color, number of legs, etc. Modern phylogeny uses information extracted from genetic material mainly DNA and protein sequences. The characters used are usually the DNA or protein sites. The relationships between species are then deduced from well conserved blocks in the alignment of several sequences, one from each examined species.