Former Director Cliff Cunningham finds surprising new branches on the arthropod family tree


In a massive DNA analysis that took nearly a decade to complete, former NESCent Director Cliff Cunningham and colleagues have compared genetic sequences from 75 different species to draw a new family tree that includes every major arthropod lineage. Some of the relationships are so surprising that new names had to be coined for five newly-discovered groupings.

The work appears online in the 25 February 2010 issue of the journal Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7284/full/nature08742.html [ more ]