Scientists Unveil New ‘Tree of Life’

A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life, a diagram that depicts the evolution of all living things. In recent years, Jillian F. Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues have been gathering DNA from many environments and assembling the genomes of new microbial species. They then studied a representative sample of life’s diversity, including DNA from 2,072 known species and DNA from 1,011 new species discovered by their team. With the help of a supercomputer, they found the tree best supported by their findings.

In their new tree, all the eukaryotes fit on a slim branch. It also supports previous findings that eukaryotes and archaea are closely related. But most remarkable is the extensive trunk of bacteria, including a new large branch representing a group of bacteria that are small in size with a simple metabolism.

See the new tree at nytimes.com…