Analysing Plant or Pathogen Lineages

Efficient agriculture requires robust analysis of plant or pathogen lineages (phylogenies). This could be used to understand the evolutionary relationships between crop species and their wild relatives, helping crop improvement, pest and disease resistance breeding, and conservation of genetic diversity important for sustainable agriculture. However, constructing evolutionary trees to trace common ancestry for large genetic datasets becomes computationally demanding due to the exponential number of possible topologies.

Quantum methods, such as Maximum Parsimony reformulated as a QUBO problem, enable the efficient construction of evolutionary trees using quantum annealing and variational quantum algorithms.

This could accelerate the inference of evolutionary relationships among crops or pests. It could also provide key insights for breeding programs and predict changes in biodiversity, community dynamics or agricultural threats.