Betül Kaçar

I think phylogenetic trees could be one of the most romantic and beautiful notions that can come out of biology.

It shows us a way to depict the connectedness of life and all living beings with one another.

It itself is an ever evolving notion.

Biologists like visualizations.

They like these graphics, these diagrams, and tree of life is one of them.

It's actually the other way around.

It starts from the branches.

It starts from the tip of the branch, actually.

And then depending on what you collected to build the tree.

So depending on the branches, depending on what's on the tip of the branch, and I will explain what I mean, the root will be determined by what is really sitting on the tip of the branch of the tree.

Exactly.

So the tree itself, by just taking a few steps back and looking at the entire tree itself, can give you an idea about the connectedness, the relatedness of the organisms or whatever, again, you use to create your tree.

There are different ways.

But in this case, I'm imagining...

The entire diversity of life today is sitting on the tips of the branches of this tree.

And we look at biologists, look at the tree itself.

We like to think of it as the topology of the tree to understand when certain organisms or their ancestry may have merged over time.

depending on the tools you use, you might use this tree to then reconstruct the ancestors as well.

We approached it in every way we can.

So it's the gene, could be protein, the product of the gene, or species, or could be even groups of species.