With the number of sequenced genomes increasing rapidly, it is impractical to perform functional and structural analyses on all individual proteins. Phylogenetic analysis employs a combination of molecular and statistical approaches to infer or estimate relationships among individuals. It provides a credible method to explore the relationship between sequence similarity and function of proteins belonging to the same family. This chapter describes a standardized framework of phylogenetic analysis to study large protein families. Bioinformatic approaches and online tools used in phylogenetic analyses are presented.
Keywords: Multiple sequence alignment; Pfam domain; Phylogenetic analysis; Phylogenetic tree; Protein family; Protein sequence searching; Subfamily cluster.