In biology, phylogenetics /faɪlɵdʒɪˈnɛtɪks/ is the study of evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms (e.g. species, populations), which are discovered through molecular sequencing data and morphological data matrices. The term phylogenetics derives from the Greek terms phylé (φυλή) and phylon (φῦλον), denoting "tribe", "clan", "race" and the adjectival form, genetikós (γενετικός), of the word genesis (γένεσις) "origin", "source", "birth".In fact, phylogenesis is the process, phylogeny is science on this process, and phylogenetics is phylogeny based on analysis of sequences of biological macromolecules (DNA, RNA and proteins, in the first). The result of phylogenetic studies is a hypothesis about the evolutionary history of taxonomic groups: their phylogeny.Evolution is a process whereby populations are altered over time and may split into separate branches, hybridize together, or terminate by extinction. The evolutionary branching process may be depicted as a phylogenetic tree, and the place of each of the various organisms on the tree is based on a hypothesis about the sequence in which evolutionary branching events occurred. In historical linguistics, similar concepts are used with respect to relationships between languages; and in textual criticism with stemmatics.Phylogenetic analyses have become essential to research on the evolutionary tree of life. For example, the RedToL aims at reconstructing the Red Algal Tree of Life. The National Science Foundation sponsors a project called the Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) activity. The goal of this project is to determine evolutionary relationships across large groups of organisms throughout the history of life. The research on this project often involves large teams working across institutions and disciplines, and typically provides support to investigators working on computational phylogenetics and phyloinformatics tasks, including data acquisition, analysis, and algorithm development and dissemination.Taxonomy—the classification, identification and naming of organisms—is usually richly informed by phylogenetics, but remains a methodologically and logically distinct discipline. The degree to which taxonomies depend on phylogenies differs depending on the school of taxonomy: phenetics ignores phylogeny altogether, trying to represent the similarity between organisms instead; cladistics (phylogenetic systematics) tries to reproduce phylogeny in its classification without loss of information; evolutionary taxonomy tries to find a compromise between them in order to represent stages of evolution.