ReviewMicrobiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR2009
Mapping the tree of life: progress and prospects.
Review in Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 110 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
110 citing papers in PubMed.
- Targeted isolation of HNature protocols · 2026Review
- Feature Frequency Profile (FFP) Method: A Language Model for Whole-Genome ("Organism") Phylogeny.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Phylogenomic Tree Reconstruction from Bacterial Genomes.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Geographic and seasonal variation of culturable bacteria associated with the diseased silkworm (Current research in microbial sciences · 2026Article
- The evolution of the tree of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Defining the cultured and uncultured bacterial fractions in Cannabis seeds.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Article
- Nanopore- and AI-empowered microbial viability inference.GigaScience · 2025Article
- High accuracy meets high throughput for near full-length 16S ribosomal RNA amplicon sequencing on the Nanopore platform.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Toward Characterizing Environmental Sources of Non-tuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) at the Species Level: A Tutorial Review of NTM Phylogeny and Phylogenetic Classification.ACS environmental Au · 2024Review
- Article
- Assessing sequence heterogeneity in Chlorellaceae DNA barcode markers for phylogenetic inference.Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2023Article
- Ribosomal Intergenic Spacers Are Filled with Transposon Remnants.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Big data mining, rational modification, and ancestral sequence reconstruction inferred multiple xylose isomerases for biorefinery.Science advances · 2023Article
- The PH Domain and C-Terminal polyD Motif of Phafin2 Exhibit a Unique Concurrence in Animals.Membranes · 2022Article
- Eukaryogenesis: The Rise of an Emergent Superorganism.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Defining how microorganisms benefit human health.Microbial biotechnology · 2021Article
- Diversity, ecology and evolution of Archaea.Nature microbiology · 2020Review
- Perspectives on Cultivation Strategies of Archaea.Microbial ecology · 2020Review
- The linkage between methane production activity and prokaryotic community structure in the soil within a shale gas field in China.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2020Article
50 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The intent of this article is to provide a critical assessment of our current understanding of life's phylogenetic diversity. Phylogenetic comparison of gene sequences is a natural way to identify microorganisms and can also be used to infer the course of evolution. Three decades of molecular phylogenetic studies with various molecular markers have provided the outlines of a universal tree of life (ToL), the three-domain pattern of archaea, bacteria, and eucarya. The sequence-based perspective on microbial identification additionally opened the way to the identification of environmental microbes without the requirement for culture, particularly through analysis of rRNA gene sequences. Environmental rRNA sequences, which now far outnumber those from cultivars, expand our knowledge of the extent of microbial diversity and contribute increasingly heavily to the emerging ToL. Although the three-domain structure of the ToL is established, the deep phylogenetic structure of each of the domains remains murky and sometimes controversial. Obstacles to accurate inference of deep phylogenetic relationships are both systematic, in molecular phylogenetic calculations, and practical, due to a paucity of sequence representation for many groups of organisms.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.