Using genomic data for reconstruction of phylogenies
A phylogenetic tree depicts the branching pattern in the
evolution of contemporary species from their common
ancestor. Given the sequences of homologous genes
(i.e., genes derived from a common ancestral gene), one
can try to reconstruct the phylogenetic tree for these
species by looking at the amount of evolutionary change
that has occurred at the molecular level and estimating the
times at which any two of these species diverged.