ReviewRNA biology2014
Carl Woese's vision of cellular evolution and the domains of life.
Review in RNA biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 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
18 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Reassessing viral origins and evolutionary placement in the tree of life.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2026Review
- The Origin(s) of LUCA: Computer Simulation of a New Theory.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- The discovery of archaea: from observed anomaly to consequential restructuring of the phylogenetic tree.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2024Article
- Main Factors Shaping Amino Acid Usage Across Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2023Review
- The Origin(s) of Cell(s): Pre-Darwinian Evolution from FUCAs to LUCA : To Carl Woese (1928-2012), for his Conceptual Breakthrough of Cellular Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2021Article
- Review
- Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of a Highly Conserved Operon Cluster in Gammaproteobacteria and Bacilli.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- The SNAP hypothesis: Chromosomal rearrangements could emerge from positive Selection during Niche Adaptation.PLoS genetics · 2020Article
- Horizontal transfer of code fragments between protocells can explain the origins of the genetic code without vertical descent.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Emergence of Life on Earth: A Physicochemical Jigsaw Puzzle.Journal of molecular evolution · 2017Review
- Microbial community structure of a freshwater system receiving wastewater effluent.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2016Article
- Emergence of life: Physical chemistry changes the paradigm.Biology direct · 2015Review
- Review
- Archaeal Clusters of Orthologous Genes (arCOGs): An Update and Application for Analysis of Shared Features between Thermococcales, Methanococcales, and Methanobacteriales.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2015Article
- Chasing the Origin of Viruses: Capsid-Forming Genes as a Life-Saving Preadaptation within a Community of Early Replicators.PloS one · 2015Article
- The relative ages of eukaryotes and akaryotes.Journal of molecular evolution · 2014Article
- The origins of cellular life.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2014Review
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 at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In a series of conceptual articles published around the millennium, Carl Woese emphasized that evolution of cells is the central problem of evolutionary biology, that the three-domain ribosomal tree of life is an essential framework for reconstructing cellular evolution, and that the evolutionary dynamics of functionally distinct cellular systems are fundamentally different, with the information processing systems "crystallizing" earlier than operational systems. The advances of evolutionary genomics over the last decade vindicate major aspects of Woese's vision. Despite the observations of pervasive horizontal gene transfer among bacteria and archaea, the ribosomal tree of life comes across as a central statistical trend in the "forest" of phylogenetic trees of individual genes, and hence, an appropriate scaffold for evolutionary reconstruction. The evolutionary stability of information processing systems, primarily translation, becomes ever more striking with the accumulation of comparative genomic data indicating that nearly all of the few universal genes encode translation system components. Woese's view on the fundamental distinctions between the three domains of cellular life also withstand the test of comparative genomics, although his non-acceptance of symbiogenetic scenarios for the origin of eukaryotes might not. Above all, Woese's key prediction that understanding evolution of microbes will be the core of the new evolutionary biology appears to be materializing.
Indexed as
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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.