Sprecher
Beschreibung
The tree of life (TOL) is a powerful framework to depict the evolutionary history of cellular organisms through time, from the last universal common ancestor, LUCA, to extant archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes shaping biodiversity on Earth today.
During the past decades, our perception of the TOL has fundamentally changed in part due to profound methodological advances which allowed a more objective approach to study organismal diversity and led to the discovery of major new branches in the TOL. For example, single cell and metagenomics approaches to reconstruct genomes of uncultivated microorganisms, has enabled the generation of a wealth of genomic data of previously unknown microbial such as the ubiquitous and diverse symbiotic DPANN archaea and CPR bacteria as well as shed new insights into the origin of the eukaryotic cell from a symbiosis between an Asgardarchaeon and alphaproteobacterial partner.
In this talk, I will present aspects of our research that have contributed to new key insights into the divergence of archaea and bacteria, the placement of genome-reduced symbionts in the TOL and the timing of major evolutionary transitions including the origin of the eukaryotic cell.
