Читать книгу Principles of Microbial Diversity - James W. Brown - Страница 37

Thinking about organisms from a phylogenetic perspective is critically important for two reasons:

First, so that you can predict the properties of organisms based on the properties of their relatives. Think about how much insight you can get into a person by getting to know his or her family—this is why meeting the family of someone you’re dating is so important! Understanding an organism’s relationships to other species is the key to understanding its properties.

Second, so that you can prevent inappropriate comparisons based on nonexistent relationships. For example, Euglena was used for years as a unicellular model system to study photosynthesis in green plants. However, it turns out that Euglena is related not to plants but to trypanosomes. Its chlorophyll is not like those of plant chloroplasts and was acquired independently. Chlamydomonas is a better system because it is phylogenetically a unicellular green plant.