Biology

Systematics and Taxonomy I, II

Overview
Systematics and Taxonomy I: For the last 250 years, taxonomists have described 1.9 million species of organisms based on the nomenclature starting from ‘Systema Naturae’ by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. The species diversity of metazoans accounts for about 70% of that of the entire organisms, currently classified into about 35 animal phyla. The evolutionary relationship between these phyla had been traditionally discussed based on the comparison of body plans, but our understanding on the animal tree of life has been rapidly promoted by the recent development of phylogenomics. This lecture aims to understand the phylogenetic relations of the animal phyla by learning the diversity of each phylum and comparing the traditional/current knowledge.

Systematics and Taxonomy II: Theorganisms which perform photosynthesis are collectively called ‘plants’, which include land plants and algae. They share the possession of chlorophyll a, but otherwise their evolutionary entities are quite different from each other. In this lecture, we seek the answers for the questions such as how the diversity of plants brought about, and what are the relationships between photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic organisms. Particularly we will focus on various algae and learn their characteristics.