Phylogenetics and Phylogenomics for Inferring Relationships of Bacteria and Archaea Phyla

Phylogenetics and phylogenomics are two related fields that deal with the study of the evolutionary relationships between different organisms. In the context of bacteria and archaea phyla, these fields are used to infer the relationships between different species and to understand how they have evolved over time. Phylogenetic methods use genetic data, such as DNA and protein sequences, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of an organism. Phylogenomic methods, on the other hand, take a genome-wide approach and use the entire genome of an organism to infer its evolutionary history. Both of these methods are widely used in the study of bacteria and archaea phyla and have provided valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of these important groups of organisms. The discovery of Sanger sequencing and PCR in the late 1970s paved the way for microbial taxonomy and classification to shift from a traditional to a sequence-based approach. Next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics approaches are now taking microbial taxonomy studies to a new level and making them more firm than ever before. In this chapter, we talked about how phylogenetics and phylogenomics can be used to figure out ancestry and reconstruct evolutionary relationships.