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Taxonomic ranks are important in all of the following nomenclatural systems EXCEPT for:

You are a college professor running a systematics lab.  Your grad student found a paper in the literature reporting the phylogeny of her favorite group of organisms, based on gene A.  To verify the published phylogeny, she sequences gene B and gets a slightly different phylogeny.  What are four possible explanations for the difference between her result and the published one?

Ultra-conserved-elements (UCES) which are found across many taxa can be used to develop baits for which sequencing approach?

Which of the following is not a useful method to find genes in a sequence of base pairs?

In terms of our classification scheme for life on earth, if you use a phylogeny to name a new genus from some subset of a larger group of species, in what ways is your decision arbitrary and in what ways is it based on something ‘real’?

Explain how geographical distributions provide evidence for common ancestry rather than independent origin of species (demonstrate with an example as needed).  

The tree below was estimated from HIV viral sequences for the purpose of determining whether nurse (N2) infected a patient (P) with HIV-AIDS.  The tree also includes viral sequences from a number of other infected individuals (“RO”) from the same region.  Based just on this tree what should you conclude?

In a monophyletic genus of 10 species of birds, four have evolved red-colored beaks while the other six have black-colored beaks.  If red beaks evolved independently for each species of the four species, what is the Consistency Index for this trait?

Where did the United States become involved in its first “hot war” after World War II?

A client who is 4 days postpartum after a vaginal delivery will be seen by the home visit nurse today.  Which of the following assessment findings would the home visit nurse recognize as abnormal?