Betül Kaçar

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.

It totally depends on what you want to do with your tree.

If you want to understand certain...

past events, whether an organism exchanged a certain DNA with another one along the course of evolution, you can build your tree accordingly.

If you rather use the tree to reconstruct or resurrect ancient DNA, which is what we do, then in our case, for instance, we do both gene, protein, and species because we want to compare the tree that we create using these different information.

Yeah, so dinosaurs or all these mammals, at least for us, is...

The exciting thing already happened by the time we hit to larger organisms or to eukaryotes.

The fun stuff is what people think is boring, I think.

The phase that's, well, there's two different times in the geologic history.

One is the first life, past origin of life.