Important practical implications are established by case reports and specific examples. The present book is the ideal complement to the practitioner’s manual Techniques in Molecular Systematics and Evolution, recently published by the same editors in the Birkhäuser MTBM book series.

The first part of this book deals with important applications of evolutionary and systematic analysis at different taxonomic levels. The second part discusses DNA multiple sequence alignment, species designations using molecular data, evo-devo and other topics that are problematic or controversial. In the last part, novel topics in molecular evolution and systematics, like genomics, comparative methods in molecular evolution and the use of large data bases are described. The final chapter deals with problems in bacterial evolution, considering the increasing access to large numbers of complete genome sequences.