Phylogeny - What is it? What is it used for?

List the steps a botanist goes through to create a herbarium.

1. botanist should carry a field book to record location, date of collection, habitat and associated plants, plus, flower color, plant branching patterns and height. 2. lay plant between newspapers and sheets of blotting paper, which are put between two corrugates. Blotters draw moisture from the plants and ripple the corrugated cardboard allowing the moist air to pass from the press, which dries quickly 3. Once dry, it is mounted on a sheet of herbarium paper, glued, labeled, and stored in a cabinet.

What is the preferred discipline used to study phylogeny?

Cladistics

New vocabulary has been developed - instead of "lower" or "primitive" they prefer the term "basal" when referring to a branch whose origin is relatively close to the base of a phylogeny tree, who did this?

Cladistics researchers

Who was an artist who drew a phylogenetic tree - his famous tree was titled "The Pedigree of Man"?

Haeckel

Phylogeny is an important concept in biology. Why?

It is used for classification and for understanding the nature and history of life.

What is the name of the newly proposed classification scheme that uses phylogeny exclusively?

PhyloCode

Who was Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus (Carl von Linne)?

The Father of Taxonomy. Born in Sweden in 1707, famous botanist, studied herbs and plants

What is the biggest conceptual distinction between Haeckel's idea of phylogeny and those of modern science?

The idea of rank has been dismissed. Phylogeny trees no longer refer to higher or lower animals.

What does it mean when the letter L. follows a species name?

The letter L. follows indicated a species was names by Linnaeus.

Herbarium

a collection of dried plants for educational and research purposes. This location becomes a reference center for verification of identifications, a documentation facility, and a data storehouse used by experts.

What were Linnaeus' major innovation?

a system of naming referred to as binomial nomenclature (example cup names - coffee cups, measuring cups - the first part tells what type of cup it is). His system consisted of a two-word name: genus (group name) and species (adjective that describes it special characteristics).

Cladistics

a systematic way of tracing phylogeny based on shared characteristics of organisms.

Phylogeny is an area of active research for whom?

biologists

Biotransformation is useful in diverse fields such as

bioremediation (the use of bacteria to clean up environmental pollutants) to drug manufacturing.

Since rank has been eliminated from a phylogeny tree, what shape does the tree end up being?

circular to save space.

Phylogeny can refer to what?

evolutionary history of an individual, a population, or a group of populations. It can even be traced for an individual gene because genes are the basic unit of evolution.

Botanist

has to collect species of plants, herbs, and flowers and preserve them.

Phylogeny is an integral part of a broad, unified view of biology, but is more than just knowledge for knowledge sake. What can it be applied to?

human understanding of life, of biochemistry and of evolution.

Where is phylogeny used extensively - it may now be considered the primary factor?

in biological classification.

Molecular phylogeny has direct applications for medicine especially in this field.....

infectious disease

Phylogeny

is the evolutionary history of an organism. Green word meaning "birth of races." Also know as the genealogy of living things.

Phylogeny tree

like a family tree.

What is "intelligent screening?"

studying the phylogeny of different bacterial strains can enable researchers to select the appropriate strain for a given biotransformation.

Biotransformation

the process of living cells modifying molecules.

Taxonomy

the science of classification

Molecular phylogeny

the study of the phylogeny of biochemical characteristics, such as genes and proteins.