Monday, October 6, 2014

Phylogeny: Where Does It Go

Phylogeny: Where Does It Go?

Conserved Core Process
     All life has shared many features that stayed  the same during the course of evolution. Theses conserved traits are what keeps our relation between everything living. For example your house is a different color and stay than your friends and neighbors houses, however they still all have the same things in them such as bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens. 
     All domains Eukaryotes, Achaea and Bacteria have DNA ( gene sequence).  Every organism that we have found to date has its own DNA and this provides biological evidence.  The great thing about DNA is that is universal and can be changed and manipulated.  See what makes “you” at the end of the day is the process of the Central Dogma. This process involves how DNA process RNA into proteins.

     Another attribute that all life has is metabolism. Metabolism is the process of how energy is cycled through a organism. Just like eating a pizza, your body is processing usable energy for your body to use and then process it out for a cycle of energy. Though organism process energy through anaerobic or aerobic respiration, they all share the characteristic for metabolism.




            The final attribute that life shares are the evolution of eukaryotes supports the relatedness through structural evidence. All eukaryotes have a cytoskeleton that helps the cells to move, morphological integrity and organelle transport. Another example of eukaryote structural evidence is membrane bound organelles, such as the mitochondria and chloroplast. Scientist theorized that at first these membrane bound organelles were bacteria that lived in the cell and evolved to become part of the cell.
     All of these characteristics are conserved all across the tree of life. From eukaryotes to bacteria they all have the same attributes that are followed through life.
Phylogenetic Tree
     When you look back at your family tree you look back at all of your relatives and see the history of everyone. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species or group of species. Scientists use systematics to understand the diversity and relationships of organisms. Fossils, morphological and molecular evidence, support this process. By using this process scientist can then order them into categories. Taxonomy is the ordered division of organism into categories.  The biological name of a species is two parts. The first one is the genus and the second part is the specific epithet. The specific epithet is specific only to that species. Our biological name is homo sapiens which means wise man. Once you piece all of these bits together you have created a classification system.
Below is the Hierarchical classification of life

      Phylogenetic trees are branching diagrams that depict hypotheses about evolutionary relationships of all life. A cladogram is a diagram that shows patterns of shared characteristics. Both of these diagrams show traits that have been lost or have been gained from evolution. A clade is a group of species that includes an ancestral species and all of its descendants.


Here are some examples of Phylogenetic trees and cladograms:






















References: 



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)