Discussion

Phylogeny is one of the more interesting tools which allows for the recontextualization of a species into finding its place in the collection of evolutionary relationships shining new light on how similar the machinery is between all organisms. As was discussed in the introduction this was motivated by trying to place the isoprenyl production that uniquely makes up archaeal membranes in an evolutionary context to see where it may have come from. This result provides some surprising conclusions. As many of the eukaryote are much more closely tied to archaea then bacteria, an assumption that the 2 compared eukaryotes would have greater similarity between their geranylgeranyl diphosphate synthase which in archaea is referred to as bifunctional short chain isoprenyl diphosphate synthase. This turned out to be difficult to make a worse prediction. As can be seen in Figure 3 with the dramatically long tail to Homo sapiens and the amoeba Entamoeba histolytica. This indicates that there is a larger connection between bacterial metabolism and archaeal membranes then to their closer genetic relatives in Eukarya. This does make some sense as even though archaea and eukaryotes share much of their 16s gene, the eukaryotic membrane does not have the cyclic isoprenyl.