“This is the most exciting and important paper on big questions about eukaryotic origins and the tree of life in years,” said evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Palmer of Indiana University, Bloomington, ...

The genomic diversity of eukaryotic microorganisms has not yet ... Apicomplexa is just one of three branches of the alveolate tree — the other two being occupied by the Dinophyceae ...

“But what we don’t know, and that’s really important, is what these genes did or are doing in Asgard currently.” The question of where exactly eukaryotes branch on the tree of life has been debated by ...

These functional types do not correspond to natural groups, because they occur in an interleaved manner across the tree of eukaryotic life. Instead they correspond to ecological specializations.