- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is phylogenetics?
- Why is phylogenetics important?
- What is a phylogeny?
- Major stages in phylogenetic analyses
- Phylogenetics resources at EMBL-EBI
- Discovering the phylogeny of all flowering plants
- Summary
- Quiz: test your knowledge
- Learn more
- Your feedback
- References
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Summary
- Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships among nucleotide or protein sequences
- There are many applications of phylogenetics, including forensics, pathogen surveillance, conservation and bioinformatics
- There are several aspects of phylogenies that you need to understand in order to interpret your trees: topology, branch lengths, nodes and confidence.
- Careful interpretation is critical to understanding the biological meaning of phylogenies
- The same phylogenetic tree can be visualised in many different ways
- Evolutionary relationships can be unraveled by identifying the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) shared by species
- EMBL-EBI has several resources and tools that are relevant to the field of phylogenetics including: Ensembl and ClustalW2 Phylogeny