Cousins, Not Ancestors

You'll learnwhy two living species are cousins rather than parent and child, and how a counted protein places the fork between them.

A bacterium, the yeast in bread, an oak tree and you all run the same genetic code, build proteins on ribosomes, spend ATP and sit inside a lipid membrane. None of that had to be shared. Then four bears and one conserved protein show you where the branches go. Twelve short steps; press Next for each one.

AP BIOLOGY · 12 STEPS · 6 QUICK CHECKS · THE FORK, NOT THE LINE · LYST · FOUR BEARS · v5

one shared toolkit · the fork, not the line · four bears

Before you start

What you're looking at

A grid checking four very different living things — a bacterium, yeast, an oak and you — against features they might share.

The question

Why do four organisms this different run exactly the same machinery inside?

Step 1 / 12