Conserved sequences identify the closest living relatives of primates

Molecular and genomic data identify the closest living relative of primates.

A full understanding of primate morphological and genomic evolution requires the identification of their closest living relative. In order to resolve the ancestral relationships among primates and their closest relatives, we searched multispecies genome alignments for phylogenetically informative rare genomic changes within the superordinal group Euarchonta, which includes the orders Primates, ...

Science Molecular and Genomic Data Identify the Closest Living Relative of Primates

Aerotaxis in the closest relatives of animals

As the closest unicellular relatives of animals, choanoflagellates serve as useful model organisms for understanding the evolution of animal multicellularity. An important factor in animal evolution was the increasing ocean oxygen levels in the Precambrian, which are thought to have influenced the emergence of complex multicellular life. As a first step in addressing these conditions, we study ...

Phylogenetic Studies of the Charales: the Closest Living Relatives of Land Plants

Title of dissertation: PHYLOGENETIC STUDIES OF THE CHARALES: THE CLOSEST LIVING RELATIVES OF LAND PLANTS Kenneth Gregory Karol, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Associate Professor Charles F. Delwiche Department of Plant Biology The embryophytes (land plants) consist of organisms such as mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. Although land plants have long been though...

The Closest Unicellular Relatives of Animals

Molecular phylogenies support a common ancestry between animals (Metazoa) and Fungi, but the evolutionary descent of the Metazoa from single-celled eukaryotes (protists) and the nature and taxonomic affiliation of these ancestral protists remain elusive. We addressed this question by sequencing complete mitochondrial genomes from taxonomically diverse protists to generate a large body of molecu...