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The Tree of Life Consolidates

Posted by kdawson on from the pruning-it dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "The Tree of Life is an expression first used by Charles Darwin to describe the diversity of organisms on Earth and their evolutionary history. There are only two life forms, — eukaryotes, which gather their genetic material in a nucleus, and prokaryotes, such as bacteria, which have their genetic material floating freely in the cell. Until recently, eukaryotes, which include humans, were divided into five groups. But now, based on work by European researchers, the Tree of Life has lost a branch. After doing the largest ever genetic comparison of life forms they concluded that there are only four groups of eukaryotes."

2 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Archaea by virology-not+for+com · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's not forget that many scientists think there are three domains (Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Archaea). Archaea are very similar to Prokaryotes in that they don't have a nucleus, but they also share many features with Eukaryotes, including several key enzymes. Due to their similarity to the two other lineages, it is thought that Archaea may in fact be the grand daddy of all life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea

  2. Re:Just hoopla over definitions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I never heard of "PLoS ONE", it claims to be a peer reviewed journal at least. If this was ground breaking I'd expect it to be published in Nature though.

    I'm actually surprised you haven't heard of PLoS journals.

    PLoS is an open-access publisher of science journals. Basically, the journals are free to access, and content is published under a creative-commons-type license.

    PLoS journals are excellent, and rival the best journals in their content. There is no "general" science journal like Science or Nature, but there are topical journals like PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, etc. I'd argue that the content in these topic journals are comparable to Nature and Science publications.

    PLoS One is a relatively experimental journal published by PLoS that attempts to push the open access model to its limits, by making the peer-review process completely open, where anyone is allowed to comment.

    If anything, the fact that this article was published in a PLoS journal raised rather than lowered my expectations regarding its quality.