In addition, anyone can view or edit the Tree of Life online, not just the institutions behind the project. She encourages everyone to “Think of it as a version 1.0”.

“Although a massive undertaking in its own right, this draft tree of life represents only a first step”, the researchers wrote. “Working with NOVA to make our work accessible to virtually anyone with Internet access is exciting, we want as many people as possible to experience some of the evolutionary wonders contained in the tree of life”. However, this is the first time ever that these results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all life.

The findings were published on Friday in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The motive behind the creation is to invent new drugs, increase crops and livestock yields and find the origin and cure of some deadly diseases like influenza, Ebola and HIV. “To complete this project, we had to code our own solutions”.

And because scientists believe that all life on Earth shares a common genetic ancestor, understanding how millions of species are related helps them improve agricultural methods and better understand viruses, the research team says.

The assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology notes that combining the 484 existing trees was, indeed, a painstaking process which took the team all of three years to complete.

“It’s by no means finished”, said Cranston.

“Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life”, commented Cody Hinchliff, from the University of Idaho.

The newly released tree of life shows different species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes, and their relationships that developed for the past 3.5 billion years ago.

Evolutionary trees are branching diagrams that often look like a cross between a candelabra and a subway map.

The vast majority of evolutionary trees are published as PDFs and other image files that are impossible to enter into a database or merge with other trees.

Subsequently, some of the relationships in the tree, such as the branches between the pea and sunflower families contrast with expert opinion.

In an effort to fill the gaps in data, the team is developing a program that will allow researchers to update and revise the tree in real-time as new data emerges on the now unnamed and undiscovered species on Earth.

The other tool that came out of their research is a puzzle-based game called Build A Tree, in which players create their own phylogenetic trees from a set of species and a list of shared traits.

“As important as showing what we do know about relationships, this first tree of life is also important in revealing what we don’t know”, said co-author Douglas Soltis of the UF, referring to insects and microbes which are not explicitly explained. “The Open Tree of Life is an important starting point that other investigators can now refine and improve for decades to come”.

Researchers who put the tree together with a $5.76 million grant, said the biggest challenge was accounting for name changes, mistakes and abbreviations for species mentioned in discrete trees, some of which date to 100,000 years ago.

http://www.dispatchtimes.com/researchers-publish-largest-ever-online-tree-of-life/97058/