Multiple alignment analysis on phylogenetic tree of the spread of SARS epidemic using distance method

A tutorial on the balanced minimum evolution problem

“…By providing core insights on the evolutionary dynamics of many fine-scale molecular data, phylogenies prove of considerable assistance in a multitude of research fields and applications ranging from systematics to medical research, passing through drug discovery, epidemiology, ecology, biodiversity assessment and population dynamics [45,79,83,97,108,116,154]. For example, phylogenies have been used to predict evolution of human influenza A [15,123]; to understand the relationships between the virulence and evolution of HIV [17,115,124,133]; to identify emerging viruses such as SARS [2,67,104]; to recreate and investigate ancestral proteins [33,160]; to design neuropeptides causing smooth muscle contraction [5]; to relate geographic patterns to ecological and macro-evolutionary processes [69,90,96,107]; or to uncover similarities in evolution of a number of human languages [12,79]. Phylogenies have also been used to study the evolutionary processes underlying the genetic factors involved in common human diseases [24,29,109,122,147,148] as well as those at the core of the progression of carcinomas over time [30,35,91,110,129,130,142,152].…”