Taxonomy is fundamental to understanding the variety of lifeforms, and exciting expansions in molecular biology are re-volutionising the obtained data. This volume reviews the ma-jor molecular biological techniques that are applied in ta-xonomy. The chapters are arranged in three main sections:1)Overviews of important topics in molecular taxonomy; 2) Casestudies of the successful application of molecular methodsto taxonomic and evolutionary questions; 3) Protocols for arange of generally applicable methods. The described techni-ques include DNA-DNA hybridization, DNA fingerprinting, RFLPanalysis, and PCR sequencing.