Three-dimensional representation of the net of life. The tree backbone was generated by using the average gene similarity approach (see Methods). The root is represented as a yellow sphere. Bacteria are shown as nodes on cyan branches; Archaea, as nodes on green branches. Red lines correspond to the vines representing HGT. The radius of the nodes is proportional to the estimated gene content size (in terms of number of gene families). Also, the widths of both the vertical inheritance branches and the horizontal inheritance vines correspond to the numbers of gene families transferred by either mechanism. For visualization purposes, only values for HGT vine width >30 are shown. Certain key species and taxa are labeled; for full names, please refer to Supplemental material.
