Scientists Reimagine The Tree of Life With New Microbe Knowledge

Following years of intense exploration and research into the microbial world, scientists have reimagined the tree of life—the iconic visual representation of the living world first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859.
Banfield/UC Berkeley
The new tree of life.
The project was led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who over the last decade have been gathering DNA from across the globe—from everywhere from meadow soils and river mud to deep sea vents—to reconstruct genomes and describe thousands of new microbial species. Curious how their findings fit into the tree of life, the scientists used a supercomputer to visualize how more than 3,000 new and known species related to one another. They discovered that eukaryotes, the group that includes humans, exist on a thin twig compared to the microbial branch of the tree. “The tree of life as we know it has dramatically expanded due to new genomic sampling of previously enigmatic or unknown microbial lineages,” the authors wrote.