Small portion of phylogenetic data is stored publicly
‘The glass is still pretty empty’
Sometimes you wonder whether the glass is half full or half empty.
But when it is only filled for four percent—the other 96 percent is just air—there is only one conclusion: it is time for more.
At least that is what some scientists in the phylogenetic community argue, because only about four percent of all published phylogenies are stored in places such as TreeBASE or Dryad. Their message is quite simple: it is time to bring together more databases with estimations on how species are possibly related to each other.
Several journals in the evolutionary biology field recently adopted policies that encourage or require contributors to make their data publicly available online. Yet, this only leads to the storage of a very small percentage of ten-thousands of phylogenies that have been constructed in the past few decades.
Of course, there are also other ways to receive data that are not stored on the Internet, but those alternatives are commonly not the most efficient routes. For instance, it is possible to send an email to a scientist who published a phylogenetic tree and “sometimes wait for six months to maybe get a response—either with or without the data,” says Keith Crandall, one of the Open Tree of Life investigators and the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute at George Washington University.
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Teamwork:
Across disciplinary boundaries
What do a fungal evolutionary biologist and a computer scientist have in common?
It is usually easier to name a long list of differences, but that does not mean that those scholars are investigating different issues all the time. They may be very much interested in the same problems, yet apply different perspectives and methods in search for answers.
Those scientists could continuously work on their individual research projects for may years. However, in some cases only an interdisciplinary collaboration leads to a solution. The investigators of the Open Tree of Life project hope this will be the case for them as well. Their goal: creating a tree of life that includes all 1.9 million known species. (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 