J.-F. Li’s scientific contributions

With the rapid development of sequencing technologies, molecular data are accumulated with unprecedented pace which enable biologists to reconstruct the tree of life of all the organisms in the world. Moreover, the use of evolutionary trees is a fundamental step in many biological problems, such as multiple sequence alignments, protein structure and function prediction, and drug design. In this paper, we review the development and studying status of phylogeny reconstruction technology. The major limitations in phylogeny reconstruction technologies are analyzed. Then some vital aspects that may be conducted in the future investigations are discussed.