Tree of Life Workshop III: Developing the Technology and Infrastructure Needed for Assembling the Tree of Life

Abstract

Whether biologists are interested in describing the history of life, or in using evolutionary relationships in a comparative framework to analyze biological data from other fields, phylogenetic trees provide the basic framework for interpreting biological data. A complete description of the Tree of Life would give biologists the same kind of predictive power that chemists have from the Periodic Table of Elements, but on a much larger and more complex scale. The proposed project, “Assembling the Tree of Life,” aims to expand this power of analysis for all biological taxa on Earth. Although the goal of describing the relationships among all known species is an ambitious idea, biologists are discovering that complete phylogenetic analyses of particular groups are providing unprecedented power for interpreting and understanding biological diversity. For instance, phylogenetic trees are being used increasingly within the health sciences to identify disease agents and predict disease outbreaks. Within comparative genomics, trees help us understand changes in gene structure and function across life’s diversity and make sense of normal and abnormal patterns of development in different organisms. Within resource management, phylogenetic methods are being used as research tools to identify exotic invasive species that may disrupt ecosystems or compromise our food supply and to locate their point of origin. These example applications and many others depend on accurate and thorough estimates of the Tree of Life.