As both a computational and an experimental endeavor, ancestral sequence reconstruction remains a timely and important technique. Modern approaches to conduct ancestral sequence reconstruction for proteins are built upon a conceptual framework from journal founder Emile Zuckerkandl. On top of this, work on maximum likelihood phylogenetics published in Journal of Molecular Evolution in 1996 was one of the first approaches for generating maximum likelihood ancestral sequences of proteins. From its computational history, future model development needs as well as potential applications in areas as diverse as computational systems biology, molecular community ecology, infectious disease therapeutics and other biomedical applications, and biotechnology are discussed. From its past in this journal, there is a bright future for ancestral sequence reconstruction in the field of evolutionary biology.

作为一项计算和实验工作，祖先序列重建仍然是一项及时且重要的技术。对蛋白质进行祖先序列重建的现代方法建立在期刊创始人 Emile Zuckerkandl 的概念框架之上。最重要的是，1996 年发表在《分子进化杂志》上的最大似然系统发育研究是生成蛋白质最大似然祖先序列的首批方法之一。从其计算历史、未来模型开发需求以及在计算系统生物学、分子群落生态学、传染病治疗学和其他生物医学应用以及生物技术等不同领域的潜在应用进行了讨论。从它的过去在这个杂志上，