Phylogenetic analyses: a brief introduction to methods and their applications

Phylogenetic analysis of molecular sequence data plays an increasingly important role in clinical medicine, both in the emerging field of molecular epidemiology and in the rational design of new therapeutic agents. The alms of this review are to introduce some of the methods used to construct phylogenetic trees, to illustrate some of the pitfalls that can introduce artifactual results and to speculate on the long-term importance of this area of computational biology in clinical medicine.