Genome comparison is one of the excellent ways to interpret the evolutionary relationships between organisms. The basic principle of genome comparison is that if two species share a common feature, it is likely encoded by the DNA sequence conserved between both species. The advent of genome sequencing technologies in the late 20th century enabled scientists to understand the concept of conservation of domains between species and helped them to deduce evolutionary relationships across diverse...

The genomes of eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of sequence which do not code for proteins or RNAs. Although some of these regions do contain crucial regulatory sequences, the vast majority of this DNA serves no known function. Typically, these regions of the genome are the ones in which the fastest change, in evolutionary terms, is observed, because there is typically little to no selection pressure acting on these regions to preserve their sequences.
In contrast, regions which code...

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.

A population is composed of members of the same species that simultaneously live and interact in the same area. When individuals in a population breed, they pass down their genes to their offspring. Many of these genes are polymorphic, meaning that they occur in multiple variants. Such variations of a gene are referred to as alleles. The collective set of all the alleles within a population is known as the gene pool.

The first human genome sequencing project cost $2.7 billion and was declared complete in 2003, after 15 years of international cooperation and collaboration between several research teams and funding agencies. Today, with the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, the cost and time of sequencing a human genome have dropped over 100 fold.
Next-Generation Sequencing Methods
Although all next-generation methods use different technologies, they all share a set of standard features....

RNA sequencing, or RNA-Seq, is a high-throughput sequencing technology used to study the transcriptome of a cell. Transcriptomics helps to interpret the functional elements of a genome and identify the molecular constituents of an organism. Additionally, it also helps in understanding the development of an organism and the occurrence of diseases. 
Before the discovery of RNA-seq, microarray-based methods and Sanger sequencing were used for transcriptome analysis. However, while...