Authors
Cody E Hinchliff, Stephen A Smith, James F Allman, J Gordon Burleigh, Ruchi Chaudhary, Lyndon M Coghill, Keith A Crandall, Jiabin Deng, Bryan T Drew, Romina Gazis, Karl Gude, David S Hibbett, Laura A Katz, H Dail Laughinghouse IV, Emily Jane McTavish, Peter E Midford, Christopher L Owen, Richard H Ree, Jonathan A Rees, Douglas E Soltis, Tiffani Williams, Karen A Cranston
Publication date
2015/10/13
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
112
Issue
41
Pages
12764-12769
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Description
Reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships that unite all lineages (the tree of life) is a grand challenge. The paucity of homologous character data across disparately related lineages currently renders direct phylogenetic inference untenable. To reconstruct a comprehensive tree of life, we therefore synthesized published phylogenies, together with taxonomic classifications for taxa never incorporated into a phylogeny. We present a draft tree containing 2.3 million tips—the Open Tree of Life. Realization of this tree required the assembly of two additional community resources: (i) a comprehensive global reference taxonomy and (ii) a database of published phylogenetic trees mapped to this taxonomy. Our open source framework facilitates community comment and contribution, enabling the tree to be continuously updated when new phylogenetic and taxonomic data become digitally available. Although data …
Scholar articles
CE Hinchliff, SA Smith, JF Allman, JG Burleigh… - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015
KA Cranston - bioRxiv, 2014