Analysing the genetic diversity of commonly occurring diseases

Abstract

It is generally believed that the existence of all organisms present on this earth has their point of convergence in a common gene pool. The current species passed through an evolutionary process which is still underway. The theoretical assumptions relating to the common descent of all organisms are based on four simple facts: first, they had wide geographical dispersal; second, the different life forms were not remarkably unique and did not possess mutually exclusive characteristics; third, some of their attributes which apparently served no purpose had an uncanny similarity with some of their lost functional traits; and last, based on their common attributes these organisms can be put together into a well-defined, hierarchical and coherent group, like a family tree. Phylogenetic networks are the main tools that can be used to represent biological relationship between different species. Biologists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and others have designed various models for the reconstruction of evolutionary networks and developed numerous algorithms for efficient predictions and analysis. Even though these problems have been studied for a very long time, but the computational model built to solve the biological problems fail to give accurate results while working on real biological data, which could be due to the premises on which the model is based. The objective of this paper is to test and analyse the transmission of commonly occurring diseases to fit into more realistic models. The problems are not only important because we need to know how they came into existence and how they migrated, but also helpful for the treatment of such diseases and drug discovery.