ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2009
The not so universal tree of life or the place of viruses in the living world.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- PhaGCN_Cluster: A Scalable and Robust Framework for Automated Classification and Discovery of Viral Dark Matter from Metagenomes.Interdisciplinary sciences, computational life sciences · 2026Article
- Reassessing viral origins and evolutionary placement in the tree of life.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2026Review
- Protein structure-informed bacteriophage genome annotation with Phold.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Integrated analysis of protein sequence and structure redefines viral diversity and the taxonomy of thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The Arrival of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Viruses in North America, Ensuing Epizootics in Poultry and Dairy Farms and Difficulties in Scientific Naming.Microbial biotechnology · 2024Review
- Chapter 5: Major Biological Innovations in the History of Life on Earth.Astrobiology · 2024Article
- A critique of the use of species and below-species taxonomic terms for viruses-time for change?Virus evolution · 2024Article
- Four principles to establish a universal virus taxonomy.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Frequency and Content of the Last Fifty Years of Papers on Aristotle's Writings on Biological Phenomena.Journal of the history of biology · 2022Review
- Current Opinion in LAIV: A Matter of Parent Virus Choice.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- Viruses Defined by the Position of the Virosphere within the Replicator Space.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2021Article
- A Place for Viruses on the Tree of Life.Frontiers in microbiology · 2020Review
- Giant Viruses-Big Surprises.Viruses · 2019Review
- Virus classification - where do you draw the line?Archives of virology · 2018Review
- Aggregation/dispersion transitions of T4 phage triggered by environmental ion availability.Journal of nanobiotechnology · 2017Article
- Isolation and Genome Sequencing of a Novel Pseudoalteromonas Phage PH1.Current microbiology · 2017Article
- Eukaryotic association module in phage WO genomes from Wolbachia.Nature communications · 2016Article
- Functional and Evolutionary Characterization of a Gene Transfer Agent's Multilocus "Genome".Molecular biology and evolution · 2016Article
- Complete Genome of a Novel Pseudoalteromonas Phage PHq0.Current microbiology · 2016Article
- When Competing Viruses Unify: Evolution, Conservation, and Plasticity of Genetic Identities.Journal of molecular evolution · 2015Article
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Abstract
Darwin provided a great unifying theory for biology; its visual expression is the universal tree of life. The tree concept is challenged by the occurrence of horizontal gene transfer and-as summarized in this review -- by the omission of viruses. Microbial ecologists have demonstrated that viruses are the most numerous biological entities on earth, outnumbering cells by a factor of 10. Viral genomics have revealed an unexpected size and distinctness of the viral DNA sequence space. Comparative genomics has shown elements of vertical evolution in some groups of viruses. Furthermore, structural biology has demonstrated links between viruses infecting the three domains of life pointing to a very ancient origin of viruses. However, presently viruses do not find a place on the universal tree of life, which is thus only a tree of cellular life. In view of the polythetic nature of current life definitions, viruses cannot be dismissed as non-living material. On earth we have therefore at least two large DNA sequence spaces, one represented by capsid-encoding viruses and another by ribosome-encoding cells. Despite their probable distinct evolutionary origin, both spheres were and are connected by intensive two-way gene transfers.
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