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Building the First Tree of All Life

• Rough draft tree for all 1.8 million named species

• Community exercise • Wikipedia-like

Family Tree

From Darwin’s The Origin of Species

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”

Earnst Haeckel’s Tree of Life

1866

What Took So Long?

• Building big phylogenetic trees a complex problem• Perfect Storm

– Algorithm development– Computational tools and power– DNA sequence revolution

A Universe of Possible TreesA Universe of Possible Trees

We are Just One Twig on the Tree of Life

You are here

Thoreau’s Woods

Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, naturalist

• Walden—best known book• Thoreau’s Woods…MA

Phylogenetic loss of species related to climate change in Thoreau’s Woods

Willis et al. 2008

Biodiversity Studies

GraphTheory

Smith et al. 2013PLoS Comput Biol 9(9): e1003223.

Building the Tree of Life

• Rough tree for all 1.8 million described species • Then becomes a community exercise• Tools (incentives) to allow researchers to edit

(annotate) portions of the tree• Include fossils—”tree of life and death”• Wikipedia-like, but many trees possible for a clade• Public Tree—Educational materials

http://blog.opentreeoflife.org/

Tree of Life

Public Tree

Public Tree