Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies

Genomics and phylogenetic studies use sequencing technologies to read the DNA and RNA of organisms, then apply computational methods—sequence alignment, genome annotation, and transcript quantification—to decode how genes are structured, expressed, and related across species. By reconstructing evolutionary histories through phylogenetic trees and characterizing genetic variation at scale, researchers can trace how life diversifies and how molecular functions are distributed across the tree of life. Extending these methods to metagenomics, where DNA is sampled directly from environmental communities rather than isolated organisms, opens the possibility of cataloguing microbial diversity in soils, oceans, and the human gut without ever culturing a single cell. Active challenges include improving the accuracy of genome assembly from short, error-prone reads, developing statistical frameworks that reliably quantify transcript abundance under noisy conditions, and building annotation tools that remain useful as reference databases grow and the organisms under study stray further from well-characterized model species.

Works

571,343

Total citations

7,683,169

Keywords

RNA-seqsequence alignmentphylogenetic analysisgenome annotationtranscript quantificationmetagenomics assembly