“We need a sense of ownership of phylogenetic trees”

Where are the fungi datasets?

A couple thousand fungi phylogeny studies have been published in the past twelve years. Clark University postdoc researcher Romina Gazis has gone through all of them. Now she is working on a bigger challenge: finding all the trees and datasets that were the foundation of those studies.

Ideally, all scientists who publish a phylogenetic tree would also deposit the datasets they used to create such trees at a publicly available online database. That allow other researchers to synthesize data from different sources to advance the knowledge about relationships between certain species and their evolutionary history.

Unfortunately, most of those datasets are not publicly available. Gazis only found datasets for about a quarter of the two-thousand fungi articles she surveyed. “Around 600 studies had tree files available, but not necessarily complete,” she concluded. “Some scientists deposited one but not all the trees.” (more…)

January 28, 2013 | Categories: Building Open Tree, We need your help! | Tags: #opentree, community, database, dataset, digital data, evolutionary trees, fungi, journal, national science foundation, open tree of life, phylogeny, science | 3 Comments