On the left, the tree of life spanning all three domains (archaea, bacteria and eukarya), obtained with the new method described in the paper. On the right, the same tree of life using current state-of-the-art inference methods. Dotted lines highlight the changes in the respective position of each taxa with the new method.
A new method shows that the relationships between living species, from bacteria to plants and animals, are different from previous estimates. Created by the group led by Nicolas Salamin, the new model will change what we know about the tree of life. The study is published in the journal PNAS. A new model to account for a previously disregarded phenomenon Although phylogenetic trees are widely used in many fields of research, including epidemiology, crop development and drug discovery, there is still a lot of discussion about the best way to estimate the relationships between organisms. The group led by Nicolas Salamin has developed a new software that revisits the tree of life as we know it. "In order to build phylogenetic trees, we generally assume that the units building the genetic data, such as the nucleotides in our DNA, evolve independently of one another. However, this is often not the case," explains Nicolas Salamin.
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