A team of researchers from eleven different scientific organizations has released an initial draft of the "tree of life," which is comprised of approximately 2.3 million species of microbes, fungi, plants and animals that exist on the Earth.
The massive evolutionary tree shows the relationships among living organisms as they diverge from each other throughout the centuries beginning with the very first species that existed on the planet around 3.5 billion years ago.
In a study featured in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers combined tens of thousands of smaller individual trees that were published over the years, with some even containing more than 100,000 different kinds of species, into a single yet extensive tree.
The resulting collection can be found at the Open Tree of Life website, where users can access it for free as well as make some edits similar to how Wikipedia operates.
Duke University researcher Karen Cranston said that the creation of the tree of life is the first genuine attempt to different species and put them all together. She called the project "Version 1.0."
The Making of the Tree of Life
To create the massive tree of life, Cranston and her colleagues collected thousands of smaller species collections found online and merged them into one giant evolutionary tree that includes all known species on Earth.
The first draft released by the researchers feature 500 smaller evolutionary trees that have been published previously in different studies.
One of the difficulties the researchers encountered during the merging of the smaller individual trees is the accounting for all the changes in the names for each species, as well as their alternate names, abbreviations and misspellings.
Cranston and her colleagues noted that even though the merging of tens of thousands of species into a single massive tree is a daunting task on its own, the resulting the tree of life is merely an initial step. Only a small number of published trees were available online during the creation of the supertree.
A study of over 7,500 writing works on phylogenetics, published from 2000 to 2012 in more than 100 different scientific journals, discovered than only one out of six papers was digitized and made available for download online.
Many of the evolutionary trees the researchers found are available in PDF format, while others are in image files that cannot be included into the database or combined with other trees.
Cranston said that this resulted in a considerable gap between what the researchers known about how living organisms are related to each other and what is digitally available to them.
Some relationships shown on the tree such as the branches related to sunflower and pea families often do not agree with what experts actually know about.
The researchers also noted that other parts of the tree of life, especially those that feature microbes and insects, continue to be obscure to them.
This is caused by the insufficiency of available DNA data in even the most frequented online archives of genetic sequences. Many of these sites only feature less than five percent of all living species on Earth, which are believed to be in the tens of millions.
While the researchers admit that this version of the tree of life is not yet complete, it is crucial to share data on published work in order to improve the evolutionary tree.
Practical Applications of Evolutionary Trees
While evolutionary trees are often used to determine closely related species, researchers believe these "subway map" of branching diagrams can be utilized to discover new medications or trace the origins of various infectious diseases, such as influenza, Ebola and HIV, and understand how these illnesses transmitted.
They can also be used for agricultural purposes in order to enhance the yield of crops and livestock.
Photo: Klaus | Flickr
