Importance Of Phylogeny

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Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution (Dobzhansky, 1973). Science of Phylogeny has advanced with addition of genome sequence data and application of new molecular approaches. Phylogenetic trees are used by biologists to resolve variety of issues pertaining to taxonomy. Angiosperm Phylogeny Group 3 classification system is the currently prevalent classification system of plants which shows the importance of phylogeny in systematics studies. The phylogenetic trees depict the relationships among various groups of organisms based on different taxonomic aspects which play a pivotal role in comparative studies (Soltis and Soltis, 2000). Phylogenetic trees can be used for fossil prediction, study of complex features, and…show more content…
Contemporary studies focus on molecular variation which is based on variation among DNA nucleotide sequences of the taxa under study. Advancements in the molecular techniques have led to a better understanding of variability within organisms. The genomes of thousands of eukaryotes have been sequenced over the past 25 years, and these data are available in online databases for animals, plants, and fungi. A huge variability is observed in plant genome size. In land plants, nuclear genome sizes differ by a factor of about 1000 fold. However, DNA can be extracted from a very small part of plant and even from degraded specimens. The most commonly used techniques in genetic diversity studies are: RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism) SSR (simple sequence repeats), RAPD (randomly amplified polymorphic DNA), ISSR (inter-simple sequence repeats), AFLP (amplified fragment length polymorphism), SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and some newly discovered high throughput programs. A diverse array of multiple sequence alignment programs such as BioEdit Sequence Alignment Editor, MULTALIN, CLUSTAL W, CLUSTAL X, BLAST, MEGA5, MEGA6 and Mesquite are available freely for inferring phylogenetic relationships among taxa. Traditional taxonomic methods basically focus on morphological variations and it is almost impossible to explain the biodiversity of earth through these approaches. In order to cover a wide…show more content…
Studies in animals, and groups such as the red algae, have shown that a portion of a mitochondrial gene (Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit 1; CO1) has standard properties required for DNA barcoding, but this cannot be used in plants due to its low discriminatory power. Nuclear and mitochondrial genome of plants are not used for DNA barcoding due to certain practical difficulties. Chloroplast DNA, in comparison, has a number of properties that make it appropriate for DNA

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