Abstract:
A review is given of recent advances in the taxonomic study of organisms and current views on biological evolution and the origin of life. The steady increase in bioinformation resources is noted, which reflects the results of studies of the Earth’s biodiversity with the use of deciphered structures of biomacromolecules (DNA, RNA, proteins, etc.). This necessitates accounting for the specific character of manipulations with large data arrays, which is currently termed the big data problem. The contributions of the treelike and net components to the topology of phylogenetic constructs are discussed, with consideration for the prevailing role of horizontal gene transfer in prokaryote evolution and life. Approaches are described to the practical use of 16S rRNA gene DNA sequences in diverse biomedical (including metagenomic) applications with traditional and nontraditional (large) amounts of molecular genetic data. Emerging results from molecular taxonomic studies of the Earth’s biota and the methods of their generation are demonstrated. The significance is noted of the current developments in particle physics and in cosmology for solving paradoxes associated with the vanishingly small probability of some fundamental processes of prebiological and biological evolution. The basis for this approach, in which the origin and evolution of life is treated as a cosmological phenomenon, is provided by the inflation theory of the origin and evolution of the observable universe, which leads to the multiverse concept, explaining the paradoxes pointed out above.
Keywords:biological and prebiological evolution, taxonomy, phylogenetic tree, horizontal gene transfer, 16S rRNA, metagenomics, big data, eternal chaotic inflation, multiverse.
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