This review provides descriptions of the molecular biological techniqu
es of PCR and DNA sequencing and the analysis of DNA sequence variabil
ity for discerning phylogenetic relationships. There is a brief discus
sion of three general categories of phylogenetic analysis, including t
hose based on pairwise distances, parsimony, and maximum likelihood. L
astly, techniques for assessing the robustness of phylogenetic hypothe
ses and for finding multiple islands of equally-parsimonious trees are
reviewed.