4. You are a capable scientist that loves to eat corn based snacks and cereals.

Question

4. You are a capable scientist that loves to eat corn based snacks and cereals. Different companies manufacture some of the snacks and cereals you buy and you are curious whether or not they use GMO corn. Devise a simple experiment that involves the use of creating a phylogenetic tree to determine whether or not these products contain GMO corn.

5. When comparing morphological features in an attempt to construct a phylogeny, how would one differentiate between homology and analogy?

6. Molecular data can also exhibit homology and analogy. When sequences of distant species match this is termed molecular homoplasy and computer tools have been developed to determine the likelihood of this event. Furthermore, closely related species that undergo divergent evolution due to differential selection in different habitats can have seemingly dissimilar sequences even though they are closely related. Analyzing these sequences often involves properly aligning them to reveal homology within the sequence. Align the following sequences and circle homologous regions.

                                                      ATTACCCTAAGCT

                                                      AACCCTAGAAGT

7. Cladistics groups taxa based on shared derived characteristics in an effort to classify groups based on common descent. What does this mean? Give an example of a group with a shared derived character?

8. Construct three trees using the letters A-F that exhibit: monophyletic clade, paraphyletic clade, polyphyletic clade.

9. Compare shared derived and shared ancestral characters.

10. What is the significance of including an outgroup when generating phylogenetic trees based on derived characters?

Explanation / Answer

6. Homology is the shared ancestry between gene sequences (or structures) in various species. Homologous gene sequence alignment for the given example is, ACCCTA.

ATTACCCTAAGCT

AACCCTAGAAGT

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