Updated 27 December 2014

Bioinformatics and Charles Darwin – Biological Approach of the New Age

Bioinformatics and Charles Darwin – Great Great Great – It’s For Mr. Darwin Once Again!!

Continue on the radical path paved by the greatest biologist ever born – Charles Darwin – How can an evolutionary biologist do that?

Bioinformatics, sometimes known as Computational Biology, is presently the best way to study the ever interesting field of evolutionary biology. Bioinformatics provides many unique and powerful tools to study evolutionary biology. One such Bioinformatics tool that I would like to mention here is PHYLIP (the PHYLogeny Inference Package).

PHYLIP is a free software package which consists of many simple yet powerful programs for inferring phylogenies. PHYLIP can be easily downloaded through the Internet.

Classification of the Programs in the PHYLIP package   

Programs included in the PHYLIP package can be enlisted by the type of data or by the type of algorithm used.

Based On The Type Of Data – DNA sequences; Protein sequences; Distance matrices; Quantitative characters;  Restriction sites; Discrete characters; Tree plotting, consensus trees, tree distances and tree manipulation; and Gene frequencies

Based On The Type Of Algorithm – Branch-and-bound tree search; Heuristic tree search; Interactive tree manipulation; Converting data, making distances or bootstrap replicates; and Plotting trees, consensus trees, tree distances

Books To Read —

Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills: An Introduction to Software Tools for Biological Applications by Cynthia Gibas