Molecular Phylogenetic Analyses and Real Life Data

Abstract

In molecular phylogeny, relationships among organisms are reconstructed using DNA or protein sequences and are displayed as trees. A linear increase in the number of sequences results in an exponential increase of possible trees. Thus, inferring trees from molecular data was shown to be NP-hard. This causes problems, if large data sets are used. This review gives an introduction to molecular phylogenetic methods and to the problems biologists are facing in molecular phylogenetic analyses.