Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Basal (phylogenetics)
Summary
In phylogenetics, basal is the direction of the base (or root) of a rooted phylogenetic tree or cladogram. The term may be more strictly applied only to nodes adjacent to the root, or more loosely applied to nodes regarded as being close to the root. Note that extant taxa that lie on branches connecting directly to the root are not more closely related to the root than any other extant taxa.
While there must always be two or more equally "basal" clades sprouting from the root of every cladogram, those clades may differ widely in taxonomic rank, species diversity, or both. If C is a basal clade within D that has the lowest rank of all basal clades within D, C may be described as the basal taxon of that rank within D. The concept of a 'key innovation' implies some degree of correlation between evolutionary innovation and diversification. However, such a correlation does not make a given case predicable, so ancestral characters should not be imputed to the members of a less species-rich basal clade without additional evidence.
In general, clade A is more basal than clade B if B is a subgroup of the sister group of A or of A itself. Within large groups, "basal" may be used loosely to mean 'closer to the root than the great majority of', and in this context terminology such as "very basal" may arise. A 'core clade' is a clade representing all but the basal clade(s) of lowest rank within a larger clade; e.g., core eudicots. Of course, no extant taxon is closer to the root than any other, by definition.
A basal group in the stricter sense forms a sister group to the rest of the larger clade, as in the following case:
While it is easy to identify a basal clade in such a cladogram, the appropriateness of such an identification is dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the diagram. It is often assumed in this example that the terminal branches of the cladogram depict all the extant taxa of a given rank within the clade; this is one reason the term basal is highly deceptive, as the lack of additional species in one clade is taken as evidence of morphological affinity with ancestral taxa.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.