Constructing Genetic Trees

After generating a complete variant profile, a key task is to reconstruct genetic relationships between individuals, populations, or cells. This is done by building phylogenetic trees or ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs), which model how different genomic regions have evolved and recombined over time. However, the space of possible trees is combinatorially vast and classical algorithms struggle with optimisation in this space. This limits the scale and accuracy of current analyses.

Quantum annealing and other quantum optimisation methods can efficiently explore these large combinatorial search spaces. Quantum approaches can potentially sample from more of the space, find better-fitting trees, and do so faster than classical heuristics alone.

Improved tree reconstruction can reveal how diseases develop, spread, and diversify at the genetic level, ultimately supporting better diagnostics and treatments.