Conclusion
The hemoglobin motif is ubiquitous in the eukaryotic and prokaryotic kingdoms, with organisms lacking this protein structure in the minority. The amount of conservation of this protein gives insights on how necessary it is for life. The amount of conservation allows us to use this protein to take a detailed look into its evolution, and into the evolution of life.
The eleven organisms chosen in this study were chosen to be representatives of a broad reach of organisms, for example, with only one bacterium chosen to signify the entire reach of prokaryotes. Due to this our study is quite limited. It is possible to make a broad, far reaching tree utilizing hemoglobin which can be compared to typical phylogenetic trees made using 16 and 18s ribosomal DNA and could possibly be used to elucidate relationships that are not as clear based on one gene.
This study also drew out how different statistical methods may have differing results based on the assumptions that each have. In this study it is obvious that maximum parsimony worked better for this dataset, but sometimes it is not as clear. Future studies may use other statistical methods, such as neighbor joining, to further compare the organisms mentioned in this study and to try to elucidate why there was such a discrepancy between these methods.
Overall, using the parsimony method our hypothesis regarding phylogenetic relationships of these species was supported. The divergence of these organisms was not explored in this study and would be an interesting future work.