Understanding the evolution of eukaryotic cellular complexity is one of the grand challenges
of modern biology. It has now been firmly established that mitochondria and plastids, the …

As more complete genomes are sequenced, phylogenetic analysis is entering a new era—
that of phylogenomics. One branch of this expanding field aims to reconstruct the …

Photosynthesis evolved in eukaryotes by the endosymbiosis of a cyanobacterium, the future
plastid, within a heterotrophic host. This primary endosymbiosis occurred in the ancestor of …

Multicellular filaments from the ca. 1200-Ma Hunting Formation (Somerset Island, arctic
Canada) are identified as bangiacean red algae on the basis of diagnostic cell-division …

Molecular phylogenetics has revolutionized our knowledge of the eukaryotic tree of life. With
the advent of genomics, a new discipline of phylogenetics has emerged: phylogenomics …

Phylogenetic information from ribosomal RNA genes directly amplified from the environment
changed our view of the biosphere, revealing an extraordinary diversity of previously …

The idea that some eukaryotes primitively lacked mitochondria and were true intermediates
in the prokaryote-to-eukaryote transition was an exciting prospect. It spawned major …

Current understanding of the higher order systematics of eukaryotes relies largely on
analyses of the small ribosomal subunit RNA (SSU rRNA). Independent testing of these …

Background Thanks to the large amount of signal contained in genome-wide sequence
alignments, phylogenomic analyses are converging towards highly supported trees …

Until recently, molecular phylogenies based on a single or few orthologous genes often
yielded contradictory results. Using multiple genes in a large concatenation was proposed to …