Under Construction

This is an archived version of a Tree of Life page. For up-to-date information, please refer to the current version of this page.

Containing group: Life on Earth

Introduction

In the last decade, advances in a variety of fields ranging from molecular biology and genomics, to statistics and phylogenetic reconstruction methods, to environmental surveys and the description of new species, have in combination led to a significant improvement of our understanding of protist diversity and evolution. To recognize these advances, and to establish a flexible resource to concentrate and distribute our knowledge about the biology and diversity of microbial eukaryotes in the context of the phylogenetic relationships among protists, a massive update of the “protist” sections of the Tree of Life Web Project is currently underway.

In July 2008, on the eve of the combined meeting of the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology and the International Society of Protistologists, members of the protist research community gathered in Halifax to present an overview of the basic biology, structure, molecular biology, and phylogenetics of different protist groups and to report on their plans for developing/updating relevant branches of the Tree of Life Web Project (see Tree of Life Web Project Protist Diversity Workshop July 2008).  The first products of this effort are the revised phylogeny above and several newly published protist pages, e.g.: Dinoflagellates, Fornicata, Arcellinida.

This page will soon present an updated discussion of eukaryote diversity, characteristics, and relationships. For the time being, please refer to the archived version of the previous version of the Tree of Life Eukaryotes page by David Patterson and Mitch Sogin.

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Information on the Internet

• Eu-Tree. Assembling the Tree of Eukaryotic Diversity.
• Protsville. Protist Research Laboratory, University of Sydney, Australia.
• Protist Information Server. Japan Science and Technology Corporation.
  • Protistologist's Home Pages.
  • Digital Specimen Archives.
• Eukaryota: Systematics. Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
• Malaria, Algae, Amoeba and You: Unravelling Eukaryotic Relationships. Joel B. Dacks. ActionBioScience.org
• Exploring Early Eukaryotic Evolution: Diversity and Relationships Among Novel Deep-Branching Lineages . Virginia Edgcomb, Andrew Roger, Alastair G.B. Simpson, Jeffrey Silberman and Mitchell Sogin, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, USA.
• Microbial Life - Educational Resources. Teaching and learning about the diversity, ecology and evolution of the microbial world; discover the connections between microbial life, the history of the earth and our dependence on micro-organisms.
• Eukaryotes in extreme environments. Dave Roberts, the Natural History Museum, London, UK.
• The Homeobox Page. Thomas R. B?rglin's page about the homeobox genes which play important roles in the development of multicellular organisms.
• Protist Image Data. Molecular Evolution and Organelle Genomics program at the University of Montreal, Canada.