Your Professor Wants You to Construct a Phylogenetic Tree of Orchids

question 1

Multiple Choice

Your professor wants you to construct a phylogenetic tree of orchids. She gives you tissue from seven orchid species and one lily. What is the most likely reason she gave you the lily?

• A) to serve as an outgroup
• B) to see if the lily is a cryptic orchid species
• C) to see if the lily and the orchids show all the same shared derived characters (synapomorphies)
• D) to demonstrate likely homoplasies

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Definitions:

Amino Acids

Organic compounds serving as the building blocks of proteins, crucial for life and involved in various metabolic processes.

Orthologs

Genes in different species that evolved from a common ancestral gene by speciation and retain the same function in the course of evolution.

Homoplasy

Homoplasy refers to a phenomenon in evolutionary biology where similar traits or structures arise independently in different lineages, not due to common ancestry.

Molecular Phylogenies

The use of molecular data to construct evolutionary trees that represent the relationships among different species or organisms.