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This is an archived version of a Tree of Life page.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.

Eukaryotes

Eukaryota, Organisms with nucleated cells

Patrick Keeling, Brian S. Leander, and Alastair Simpson
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pair of saguarosAcanthareaIthomiine butterfly feeding on Senecio flowers
taxon links [up-->]Alveolates [up-->]Stramenopiles [up-->]Rhodophyta [up-->]Choanoflagellates [up-->]The other protists [up-->]Green plants [up-->]Animals [up-->]Fungi Not MonophyleticMonophyly UncertainMonophyly UncertainMonophyly UncertainMonophyly UncertainMonophyly Uncertain[down<--]Life on Earth Interpreting the tree
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This tree diagram shows the relationships between several groups of organisms.

The root of the current tree connects the organisms featured in this tree to their containing group and the rest of the Tree of Life. The basal branching point in the tree represents the ancestor of the other groups in the tree. This ancestor diversified over time into several descendent subgroups, which are represented as internal nodes and terminal taxa to the right.

example of a tree diagram

You can click on the root to travel down the Tree of Life all the way to the root of all Life, and you can click on the names of descendent subgroups to travel up the Tree of Life all the way to individual species.

For more information on ToL tree formatting, please see Interpreting the Tree or Classification. To learn more about phylogenetic trees, please visit our Phylogenetic Biology pages.

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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.

References

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Information on the Internet

Title Illustrations
Click on an image to view larger version & data in a new window
Click on an image to view larger version & data in a new window
pair of saguaros
Scientific Name Cereus giganteus
Location Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.
Comments Saguaros, the giant columnar cacti of the Sonoran desert of northwestern Mexico and the southwestern U.S.A.
Specimen Condition Live Specimen
Life Cycle Stage adults
ToL Image Use creative commons This media file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License - Version 2.5.
Copyright © 1994
Acantharea
Scientific Name Acantharea
Comments A star-shaped protist that lives in marine habitats - its yellow colour comes from symbiotic algae living inside it.
Copyright © 1998 Linda Amaral Zettler
Ithomiine butterfly feeding on Senecio flowers
Scientific Name Ithomiini, Senecio
Location Monteverde, Costa Rica
Comments Ithomiine butterfly feeding on Senecio flowers
Specimen Condition Live Specimen
Copyright © 1996 Greg and Marybeth Dimijian
About This Page

This page is being developed as part of the Tree of Life Web Project Protist Diversity Workshop, co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program in Integrated Microbial Biodiversity and the Tula Foundation.

Patrick Keeling
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Brian S. Leander
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Alastair Simpson
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Correspondence regarding this page should be directed to Patrick Keeling at , Brian S. Leander at , and Alastair Simpson at

Page: Tree of Life Eukaryotes. Eukaryota, Organisms with nucleated cells. Authored by Patrick Keeling, Brian S. Leander, and Alastair Simpson. The TEXT of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License - Version 3.0. Note that images and other media featured on this page are each governed by their own license, and they may or may not be available for reuse. Click on an image or a media link to access the media data window, which provides the relevant licensing information. For the general terms and conditions of ToL material reuse and redistribution, please see the Tree of Life Copyright Policies.

Citing this page:

Keeling, Patrick, Leander, Brian S., and Simpson, Alastair. 2008. Eukaryotes. Eukaryota, Organisms with nucleated cells. Version 02 September 2008 (under construction). http://tolweb.org/Eukaryotes/3/2008.09.02 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/

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