Family trees are swaying.

Where we once had only eye color and blood types, today’s widespread and widely available comprehensive genomic analyses using platforms like AncestryDNA are resulting in a whole lot more familial revelations. Now even bacteria are having to re-strategize family holidays. Comprehensive sequencing demonstrates that over half of the almost 95K bacterial genomes included in the Genomic Taxonomy Database (organized largely on phenotypes) require reclassifying. | Parks, Nat Biotechnol 2018