Critical assessment of phylogenetic algorithms

Phylogenetic analyses are important part of the biological research, the idea behind which is that species are related through a history of common descent. A main goal of phylogenetics is to reconstruct how a group of species evolved in time by building a tree that would trace that evolution. Constructing such a tree would provide the opportunity to observe speciation events, horizontal gene transfer, recombination, gene duplication, and gene losses. These events are crucial for reconstructing the history of species, diversification of organisms, and the emergence of new cellular functions. Constructing a tree would also be beneficial to understand the forces and constraints of evolution on the group of sequences of interest. Knowing how a set of sequences are related could also be applied for translational research, such as drug discovery.