bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/240929; this version posted December 29, 2017. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 Proposal for practical multi-kingdom classification of eukaryotes based on monophyly 2 and comparable divergence time criteria 3 Leho Tedersoo 4 Natural History Museum, University of Tartu, 14a Ravila, 50411 Tartu, Estonia 5 Contact: email:
[email protected], tel: +372 56654986, twitter: @tedersoo 6 7 Key words: Taxonomy, Eukaryotes, subdomain, phylum, phylogenetic classification, 8 monophyletic groups, divergence time 9 Summary 10 Much of the ecological, taxonomic and biodiversity research relies on understanding of 11 phylogenetic relationships among organisms. There are multiple available classification 12 systems that all suffer from differences in naming, incompleteness, presence of multiple non- 13 monophyletic entities and poor correspondence of divergence times. These issues render 14 taxonomic comparisons across the main groups of eukaryotes and all life in general difficult 15 at best. By using the monophyly criterion, roughly comparable time of divergence and 16 information from multiple phylogenetic reconstructions, I propose an alternative 17 classification system for the domain Eukarya to improve hierarchical taxonomical 18 comparability for animals, plants, fungi and multiple protist groups. Following this rationale, 19 I propose 32 kingdoms of eukaryotes that are treated in 10 subdomains. These kingdoms are 20 further separated into 43, 115, 140 and 353 taxa at the level of subkingdom, phylum, 21 subphylum and class, respectively (http://dx.doi.org/10.15156/BIO/587483).