@matt1523
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As mentioned in the previous entry, one of the limitations hindering the existence of a comprehensive tree of life available to the public is that information is widely scattered into thousands of articles from scientific journals in the form of figures (cladograms, phylograms, ultrametric trees, etc). Each of those figures represents only a small fraction of the whole Tree of Life, so it is necessary to assemble those fractions into a single tree structure. Although all this may sound as simple as assembling a jigsaw puzzle, the process is much more complex in practice. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will be dedicated to describe this complex process in which the synthetic tree seen in the app was built from hundreds of smaller trees found in the scientific literature. As a reminder, all the references consulted for phylogenetic information of different parts of the tree of life are listed in the references section of this site. You will note that each reference has a comment indicating to which part of the tree of life it is contributing information. You can use the good ol’ Ctrl+F find function to look for a specific group of organisms by scientific name (i.e: Mammalia, Chondrichthyes, Bacteria) and then find the articles that are backing up the topology (or divergence dates) of those specific fractions of the tree of life. Tree file format: The app draws the shape of the tree of life by reading a simple newick tree file. This newick file is not generated automatically as an output file by any of the common software for phylogenetic...
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The fact that all life on Earth is connected through common ancestry in a single tree-like structure has fascinated biologists for over one and a half century and has become a central theme in biological sciences. Up to this point, the scientific community has made substantial advances in reconstructing the shape of this Tree of Life, especially in the last two decades with the advent of DNA sequences. But despite the current knowledge on a great portion of evolutionary relationships among organisms, two main limitations stand in front of the goal of displaying a fully resolved tree of life to the public: 1) Information about evolutionary relationships of groups of organisms are widely scattered into thousands of scientific papers, and 2) Effective ways to visualize a very large tree of life with thousands of leaves are currently lacking, so a diagram of such dimension is hardly contemplable within a printed page of a book or a scientific journal, and even digital tools are lagging behind (but see this web app) . Although several efforts have been made to tackle the aforementioned limitations, there is none that has focused on overcoming both simultaneously (be sure to read one of the upcoming blog entries in which pre-existing projects aiming to build the tree of life are summarized and how this project differs from them). The Tree of Life App project aims to overcome both limitations by offering a tool to explore family-level evolutionary relationships among organisms in an interactive way in the form of a mobile app currently available for iPhones (click here to download the lite version of the app)....
Learn MoreLite Version (Free) - Pro Version ($4.99 limited time only)
