Reshaping Darwin's Tree: Impact of the Symbiome

Erin A Tripp; Ning Zhang; Harald Schneider; Ying Huang; Gregory M Mueller; Zhihong Hu; Max Häggblom; Debashish Bhattacharya

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2017.05.002

Reshaping Darwin's Tree: Impact of the Symbiome

Trends Ecol Evol. 2017 Aug;32(8):552-555. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.05.002. Epub 2017 Jun 9.

Authors

Erin A Tripp¹, Ning Zhang², Harald Schneider³, Ying Huang⁴, Gregory M Mueller⁵, Zhihong Hu⁶, Max Häggblom⁷, Debashish Bhattacharya⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA.
² Department of Plant Biology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA; Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
³ Department of Ecology, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China; Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, UK.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁵ Chicago Botanic Garden, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, Illinois, USA.
⁶ State Key Laboratory for Virology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.
⁷ Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
⁸ Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources and Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Electronic address: d.bhattacharya@rutgers.edu.

PMID: 28601483
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.05.002

Abstract

Much of the undescribed biodiversity on Earth is microbial, often in mutualistic or pathogenic associations. Physically associated and coevolving life forms comprise a symbiome. We propose that systematics research can accelerate progress in science by introducing a new framework for phylogenetic analysis of symbiomes, here termed SYMPHY (symbiome phylogenetics).

Keywords: holobiont; microbe; paradigm; phylogeny; symbiome; tree.

MeSH terms

Biodiversity*
Humans
Phylogeny*