1 University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America, 2 Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States of America, 3 Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States of America, 4 George Washington University, Washington, DC, United States of America, 5 Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, United States of America, 6 Florida Museum of Natural History, Gai...

Arthropods are the most diverse group of animals and have been so since the Cambrian radiation. They belong to the protostome clade Ecdysozoa, with Onychophora (velvet worms) as their most likely sister group and tardigrades (water bears) the next closest relative. The arthropod tree of life can be interpreted as a five-taxon network, containing Pycnogonida, Euchelicerata, Myriapoda, Crustacea,...

Tree-thinking is increasingly recognized as a crucial skill in the biological sciences. However, for students, the task is wrought with challenges. Even as representations are meant to facilitate reasoning about difficult concepts such as macroevolution and the phylogenetic relationships among taxa, existing tree diagrams that are so crucial to the biologist‟s profession present many challenges...

Several conifers have been considered as candidates for "Annedda", which was the source for a miraculous cure for scurvy in Jacques Cartier's critically ill crew in 1536. Vitamin C was responsible for the cure of scurvy and was obtained as an Iroquois decoction from the bark and leaves from this "tree of life", now commonly referred to as arborvitae. Based on seasonal and diurnal amino acid ana...

The extensive data set of evolutionary relationships between organisms is often referred to as the Tree of Life. Providing an effective visual interface for teachers and students to interact with this data set requires bringing together work from many disciplines: computer science, information visualization, human-computer interaction, information classification and retrieval, systematic biolog...

 Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species or group of species.  To reconstruct phylogeny, scientists use systematics, an analytical approach to classifying the diversity and determining the evolutionary relationships of living and extinct organisms. o Evidence used to reconstruct phylogenies can be obtained from the fossil record and from morphological, biochemical, and genetic simi...

The origin of the genetic code and the rooting of the tree of life (ToL) are two of the most challenging problems in the study of life's early evolution. Although both have been the focus of numerous investigations utilizing a variety of methods, until now, each problem has been addressed independently. Typically, attempts to root the ToL have relied on phylogenies of genes with ancient duplica...

The Tree of Life (ToL) is meant to be a unique representation of the evolutionary relationships between all species on earth. Huge efforts are made to assemble such a large tree, helped by the decrease of sequencing costs and improved methods to reconstruct and combine phylogenies, but no tool exists today to explore the ToL in its entirety in a satisfying manner. By combining methods used in m...

Ankyrin (ANK) repeats are one of the most common amino acid sequence motifs that mediate interactions between proteins of myriad sizes, shapes and functions. We assess their widespread abundance in Bacteria and Archaea for the first time and demonstrate in Bacteria that lifestyle, rather than phylogenetic history, is a predictor of ANK repeat abundance. Unrelated organisms that forge facultativ...