What Is the Tree of Life?
W. Ford Doolittle , Tyler D. P. Brunet
Published: April 14, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1005912
Abstract
A universal Tree of Life (TOL) has long been a goal of molecular phylogeneticists, but reticulation at the level of genes and possibly at the levels of cells and species renders any simple interpretation of such a TOL, especially as applied to prokaryotes, problematic.
Citation: Doolittle WF, Brunet TDP (2016) What Is the Tree of Life? PLoS Genet 12(4): e1005912. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1005912
Editor: Susan M. Rosenberg, Baylor College of Medicine, UNITED STATES
Published: April 14, 2016
Copyright: © 2016 Doolittle, Brunet. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, grant number GLDSU/447989—2013. The funders had no role in the preparation of the article.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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