Rooting the Tree of Life
Greg Fournier
from: Molecular Phylogeny of Microorganisms (Edited by: Aharon Oren and R. Thane Papke). Caister Academic Press, U.K. (2010)
Abstract
Defining the evolutionary relationships between groups of organisms is a major part of modern-day microbiology. With the continuing dramatic increase in the availability of genomic data, these techniques have been extended to describing an all-encompassing "tree of life". However, identifying the location of the root of this tree corresponding to the most recent common ancestor is a challenging and distinct problem that has yet to be solved. To date, many investigations have proposed various roots, using a wide diversity of biological data and techniques. A survey of the most promising of these models illustrates the difficulty faced in reaching a scientific consensus on the issue, as well as the additional philosophical complications posed by our emerging understanding of the role of horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution read more ...
