Bioinformatics:Phylogeny: What Phylogenetic Trees can do for you?

Bioinformatics:Phylogeny: What Phylogenetic Trees can do for you?

As you know the purpose of phylogeny is to construct a history of life to better understand it, the main ourpose of phylogeny is to groupe organisms according to their similarities.

Genes mutates over time and changes, we mean by that EVOLUTION, that's why there are a lot of species (Diversity) on earth, and that's when Phylogenetics become an indispensable science to Bioinformatics especially Phylogeny.

Phylogenetics is a science that is part of phylogeny and that relies on the comparison of many species genes to find out which species are more related to others and to construct a tree of these species.

To better understand Phylogenetic trees you can read this post HERE.
To learn how to use Bioinformatics tools of constructing phylogenetic trees (As PHYLIP) you can read this post HERE.

Phylogenetic Trees can do:

1- Determining the most relative organism to yours your studying.

2- Determining the function of a gene by looking at its relatives (Orthologous genes).

3- Determining genes family.

4- Finding out about the origin of the gene you're studying.

Bioinformatics: Main Applications Of Multiple sequence Alignment

Bioinformatics: Main Applications Of Multiple sequence Alignment

You can read an introductory post to Multiple Sequence Alignment HERE, to understand what is a Multiple Sequence Alignment.

Multiple Sequence Alignment is almost the most useful tool in Bioinlformatics, it helps almost in every application of Bioinformatics (predicting protein structure, predicting protein function, phylogenetic analysis...etc).

The main applications of Multiple Sequence Alignment are:

1- Structure Prediction: a Multiple Sequence Alignment can give you the almost perfect protein or RNA secondary structure, some times it helps even with the 3D structure.

2- Protein Family: a Multiple Sequence Alignment can help you to decide that your protein is a member of a known protein family or not.

3- Pattern Identification: By looking at conserved regions or sites, you can identify which region is responsible for a functional site.

4- Domain Identification: By looking at file provided by a Multiple Sequence Alignment, you can extract profiles to use them against databases.

5- DNA Regulatory Elements: You can use Multiple Sequence Alignments to locate DNA regulatory elements such as binding sites...etc.

6- Phylogenetic Analysis: By carefully picking related sequences you can reconstruct a tree using sequences that u have used in the Multiple Sequence Alignment (You can use the PHYLIP package and you can find a post about it here).

As Multiple Sequence Alignments are playing a major role in Bioinformatics, you can use it almost anywhere but as every thing on this earth, nothing is perfect or 100% accurate, so u have to choose your sequences very carefully to prevent meaningless results.

You can access the EBI ClustalW program from HERE, to do a Multiple Sequence Alignment.

Any comments you're welcome.