An Analysis on the Phylogenetic Tree of Protists

Abstract

For a long time, now, Kingdom Protista has been regarded as the end all, catch all kingdom. The properties that distinguish a protist from other kingdoms are so variable that one can only determine that a species is a protest due to the fact that it’s not a plant, animal, fungi, eubacteria, or archaebacteria. With the aid of molecular biology techniques such as DNA sequencing and phylogenetics, the relationships of species within the Protista kingdom can be determined as well as their relationships to species in other kingdoms. The goal of this study was to create a phylogenetic tree of 8 species, both protists and some eucaryotes. This was done in order to find genetic relationships between these species to determine which ones are closely related and when they branched off from each other throughout the course of evolution.