Effects of the storage conditions on the stability of natural and synthetic cannabis in biological matrices for forensic toxicology analysis: An update from the literature

Neighbor-Joining is a bottom-up clustering method used for the creation of phylogenetic trees. Usually used for trees based on DNA or protein sequence data, Neighbor-Joining requires knowledge of the distance between each pair of taxa (e.g. species or sequences) in the tree. Neighbor-Joining is based on the Minimum Evolution criterion for phylogenetic trees, i.e. the topology that gives the least total branch length is preferred at each step of the algorithm. However, Neighbor-Joining may not find the final tree topology with least total branch length because it is a greedy algorithm that constructs the tree in a step-wise fashion. Even though it is sub-optimal in this sense, it has been extensively tested and usually finds a tree that is quite close to the optimal tree. The main virtue of Neighbor-Joining is its efficiency. It can be used on very large data sets for which other means of phylogenetic analysis (e.g. Minimum Evolution, Maximum Parsimony, Maximum Likelihood) are computationally prohibitive.