Conservation biology is a scientific field that focuses on the preservation of biodiversity in order to protect ecosystems while meeting the needs of the human population. Humans require properly functioning ecosystems to maintain our supply of natural resources, including food, medicines, and building materials.

The “tree of life” describes the evolution of life and the evolutionary relationships between organisms. The root of the tree is the common ancestor to all life on Earth. All other species radiate from this point, much like the branches of a tree. The numerous tips of these branches on the tree of life represent every living, or extant, species. Extinct species, which are species that no longer exist, can be found towards the center of the tree. Currently, these organisms, both...

Small population sizes put a species at extreme risk of extinction due to a lack of variation, and a consequent decrease in adaptability. This weakens the chances of survival under pressures such as climate change, competition from other species, or new diseases. Large populations are more likely to survive pressures such as these, as such populations are more likely to harbor individuals that have genetic variants that are adaptive under new stresses. Small populations are much less...

Many proteins’ biological role depends on their interactions with their ligands, small molecules that bind to specific locations on the protein known as ligand-binding sites. Ligand-binding sites are often conserved among homologous proteins as these sites are critical for protein function.
Binding sites are often located in large pockets, and if their location on a protein’s surface is unknown, it can be predicted using various approaches. The energetic method computationally...

Survival trees are a non-parametric method used in survival analysis to model the relationship between a set of covariates and the time until an event of interest occurs, often referred to as the "time-to-event" or "survival time." This method is particularly useful when dealing with censored data, where the event has not occurred for some individuals by the end of the study period, or when the exact time of the event is unknown.
 Building a Survival Tree
Constructing a...

Phylogenetic trees come in many forms. It matters in which sequence the organisms are arranged from the bottom to the top of the tree, but the branches can rotate at their nodes without altering the information. The lines connecting individual nodes can be straight, angled, or even curved.