Phylogenetic Concepts and Tools Applied to Epidemiologic Investigations of Infectious Diseases

In this review, which is a part of the Microbiology Spectrum Curated Collection: Advances in Molecular Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, I present an overview of the principles used to classify organisms in the field of phylogenetics, highlight the methods used to infer the interrelationships of organisms, and summarize how these concepts are applied to molecular epidemiologic analyses. I present steps in analyses that come downstream of the assembly of a set of genomes or genes and the production of a multiple-sequence alignment or other matrices of putative orthologs for comparison. I focus on the history of the problem of phylogenetic reconstruction and debates within the field about the most appropriate methods. I illustrate methods that bridge the gap between molecular epidemiology and traditional epidemiology, including phylogenetic character evolution and geographic visualization. Finally, I provide practical advice on how to conduct an example analysis in the appendix. *This article is part of a curated collection.