The phrase "a distinct branch" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a specific division or category within a larger field or system, often to highlight its uniqueness or specialization.
Example: "Botany is a distinct branch of biology that focuses on the study of plants."
Alternatives: "a separate division" or "a unique sector".
By 1900, set theory was recognized as a distinct branch of mathematics.
Albanian is the only modern representative of a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family.
Armenians constitute nearly all of the country's population; they speak Armenian, a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family.
More recent data on these hitherto poorly known languages suggest that they form a distinct branch of the Mon-Khmer family, itself a part of the Austroasiatic stock.
Most of the people are animists of Malay ancestry and speak dialects of a distinct branch of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language family.
She is understandably disappointed that mathematical biology has failed to become a distinct branch of the biological sciences and feels that biologists do not accept that mathematical explanations are the heart of true science.
P. mongolicus collected from Menofia Governorate formed a distinct branch with 99% support.
Phylogenetic analyses using these sequences showed that the NYJ strain forms a distinct branch with high bootstrap support.
Although they lived at the same time, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs; they form a distinct branch of the evolutionary tree.
Scientists once thought that every type of organism occupied a distinct branch on the tree of life; new species evolved as their genomes slowly mutated or recombined through sex.
From the tree of this study, it is an evident that P. mongolicus, collected from Menofia Governorate (CU_9 and CU_10), formed a distinct branch with 81% support which was previously reported by Schmid-Egger et al. (2017) that in N Africa P. mongolicus is restricted to Egypt.
