Presentation slides from Evolution 2013 available
Open Tree of Life at meetings
The Open Tree of Life project is one of the many phylogeny projects that are featured during the Evolution 2013 meeting that currently takes place in Snowbird (UT). The presentation slides from Karen Cranston, the principal investigator of Open Tree of Life, are available online (LINK). Presentation slides from other investigators are added here in the upcoming days.
Evolution 2013 is the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), and the American Society of Naturalists (ASN). The conference meets jointly with the iEvoBio conference. Open Tree of Life is represented at both events. About 1400 participants are expected to share their research in evolution, systematics, biodiversity, software, and mathematics.
Free webinar: Putting all species in a graph database
Biology + Technology = OTOL
One of the developers of the Open Tree of Life demonstrates Thursday, during a free webinar, how graph databases are used to construct a tree of life. The lecture is organized by Neo Technology, which is the maker of Neo4j, an open-source database that is used for OTOL.
Stephen Smith, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at the University of Michigan, is going to explain how Neo4j and other digital technologies are assisting in constructing the tree of life. Starting at 10:00 PDT (19:00 CEST), he will also discuss other aspects of the interface of biology with next generation technologies.
“Our project is building the tools with which scientists in the community can continually improve the tree of life as we gather new information. Neo4j allows us to not only store trees in their native graph form, but also allows us to map trees to the same structure, the graph. So in fact, we are facilitating the construction of the graph of life,” says Smith.
Neo4j approached the Open Tree of Life team to present a webinar because it is a project that utilizes the Neo4j graph database to represent the interconnectedness of biological data. The company considers the project a great example of how a graph database can better model the natural world.
The online lecture is intended for a broad audience including beginner computer programmers, advanced hackers, data scientists, natural scientists, and anyone interested in the cross-section of science and technology, especially data modeling. Over 150 people have already registered online.
The registration form: LINK
Update: The video from this webinar is available on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/67870035
Tree of Life: Are big changes looming on the horizon?
All species like some gadgets
While movie hero James Bond gets his spy gadgets from his loyal developer Q, almost every other species on Earth has to put a little more effort in armoring themselves. But that does not mean they cannot rely on some good ol’ friends to do so. In fact, the acquisition of genes from two or more species through lateral gene transfer can lead to innovations that at times can be painful—sometimes even deadly—to others.
One of those evolutionary novelties is noticeable for certain types of jellyfish that developed the ability to sting after their ancestors acquired a gene from a bacterium and incorporated that material in their own DNA. This gene transmission helped jellyfish to create an innovative defense tool to fend off other species that could endanger them. The result is quite frightening: more humans get killed by jellyfish than sharks. (more…)
Help!
Wanted: All your favorite trees
With eleven investigators, the Open Tree of Life project is already a large-scale research endeavor. But that does not mean that they can add all 1.9 million known species to a database by themselves. In fact, they are looking for help.
A lot of help.
The main goal of the project is to merge all existing phylogenetic trees in one overarching tree of life. In the past few months, the researchers have been working on software applications to make it possible to store all known species and, more important, to specify how they are all linked to each other in evolutionary terms.
ASSEMBLING, VISUALIZING, AND ANALYZING THE EVOLUTIONARY TREE OF LIFE 