Untangling the Tree of Life

These days, phylogeneticists(experts who painstakingly map the complex branches of the tree of life) suffer from an embarrassment of riches. The genomics revolution has given them mountains of DNA data that they can sift through to reconstruct the evolutionary history that connects all living beings. But the unprecedented quantity has also caused a serious problem: The trees produced by a number of well-supported studies have come to contradictory conclusions. Graduate student Leonidas Salichos analyze the reasons for these differences and propose a suite of novel techniques that can resolve the contradictions and provide greater accuracy in deciphering the deep branches of life's tree. To gain insight into this paradox, Salichos assembled and analyzed more than 1,000 genes.
The researchers also found that the further back in time they went the less reliable the genetic data becomes.



Article:Untangling the Tree of Life