articleNature MicrobiologyApr 11, 2016HYBRID OA

A new view of the tree of life

Planetary Science Institute · University of California, Berkeley · +7 more institutions

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Abstract

The tree of life is one of the most important organizing principles in biology(1). Gene surveys suggest the existence of an enormous number of branches(2), but even an approximation of the full scale of the tree has remained elusive. Recent depictions of the tree of life have focused either on the nature of deep evolutionary relationships(3-5) or on the known, well-classified diversity of life with an emphasis on eukaryotes(6). These approaches overlook the dramatic change in our understanding of life's diversity resulting from genomic sampling of previously unexamined environments. New methods to generate genome sequences illuminate the identity of organisms and their metabolic capacities, placing them in…

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