Ed. Print scientists built tens of thousands of EVOLUTIONARY SPECIES TREES to unite into one, the most comprehensive
This circular tree of life forms on Earth is considered a first draft. | Duke University -. Agency
Scientists have just released a draft “tree of life” including 2.3 million existing named and species, making it the most big and full. It is the first attempt to automatically combine the evolutionary tree (phylogeny) in a comprehensive tree of life.
The publication, launched through a digital platform (tree.opentreeoflife.org), is just the beginning . The tree of life will be updated based on feedback and contributions from new data released, that is, to constantly grow including new species or findings.
The first draft of the “tree of life” includes the approximately 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes.
In a collaborative effort among 11 institutions, including the University of Michigan and Duke University, the tree represents relationships between living beings as they changed from the beginning of life on Earth over 3.5 billion years ago.
Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published in recent years for selected tree branches, some with more than 100,000 species, but this is the first time these results have been combined into a single spanning tree life. The end result is a digital resource that is available free online for anyone to use or modify, much like a “Wikipedia” for evolutionary trees, said a statement from the University of Michigan.
understanding how millions of species on Earth are interrelated help scientists discover new drugs, increase the productivity of land, and trace the origins and spread of infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola and influenza, he said.
“This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together,” said lead researcher Karen Cranston, of Duke University. “Think of it as version 1.0.”
A document summarizing the findings was published online in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)”, on September 18.
The evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan Stephen Smith heads the group addressed the essential details together all branches, stems and trunks of the tree of life in a single diagram. Cody Hinchliff, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Smith, now at the University of Idaho, did much of the heavy lifting in the project and share credits with Smith first author on the publication of the journal PNAS.
Gran tree
Instead of building the tree of life from scratch, researchers rebuilt by compiling thousands of smaller fragments which had already been published online and merger resulted in a “supertree” giant covering all listed species.
“Many of the participants in the project brought thousands of trees looking in the literature, and then selecting 484 of them that were used to build the project tree of life “Hinchliff said.
” In addition to the process of combining existing trees, much of what was done at the University of Michigan was the development of tools and techniques and analysis of the tree itself, “Smith said. “To complete this project, we had to code our own solutions. Not had anything done that we could use, “he said.
The goal was to create software tools and algorithms that will balance performance and efficiency by combining a large number of trees, he noted for its Hinchliff part.
“Our software, called ‘treemachine,’ took a few days to generate the current draft tree of life in a desktop workstation equipped moderately Stephen’s office,” he said, adding that other programs they had delayed weeks to do the same job.
The research was funded by a three-year grant of $ 5.7 million from the National Science Foundation of the United States.
The version of the tree, along with the underlying and the data source code is available for browsing and downloading.
Challenges
Scientists overcame several challenges to build the tree. One of the biggest challenges was to define the exact names of the species sometimes have alternative names, common misspellings and abbreviations. Eastern red bat, for example, often appears in two scientific names, eastern red bat and boreal nycteridae. Echidnas long shared its scientific name murénidos a group, a family of fish known as brown anguiliformes.
“This project of the tree of life represents only a first step,” said the researchers.
On the one hand, only a small fraction of the trees is digitally available.
A survey of more than 7,500 phylogenetic studies published between 2000 and 2012 in more than 100 magazines She found that only one in six studies had deposited their data in a digital, downloadable format that researchers could use.
The vast majority of evolutionary trees are published in PDF and other image files are impossible to enter into a database or merge with other trees. “There is a big difference between the sum of what scientists know about how living things are related, and what is actually available digitally,” Cranston said, according to a Duke University.
As a result, the relationships shown in parts of the tree, as the branches representing the families of peas and sunflowers, are not always in accordance with the opinion of the experts.
Other parts of the tree, particularly insects and microbes, are still difficult to structure because even the most popular online file raw genetic sequences -of which many trees were constructed evolutionary-containing DNA data less than 5 percent of the tens of millions of species believed to exist on Earth.
“As important as showing what we know about relationships, this first tree of life is also important in the revelation of what we do not know,” he said co-author Douglas Soltis of the University of Florida.
“25 years ago it was said that the goal of a large tree was impossible,” Soltis said. “The tree of life is an important starting point that other researchers can now perfect,” he said.
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