Scientists Create The World’s Most Comprehensive ‘Tree Of Life’

Tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, scientists have created the first “tree of life” for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. “Understanding phylogenetic trees can be hard , but we’re working to make it more accessible”, says principal investigator Chia Shen, director of Scientists’ Discovery Room (SDR) Lab. Shen’s team worked for several years to develop Deep Tree, “an open-ended space to explore the common ancestry of all species and understand how life continues to evolve”.

They had gone through exorbitant amount of trees out there, until they narrowed it down to 484 that accurately depicted all areas they required, and then carefully connected the dots in order to generate the ultimate Tree of Life, according to Stephen Smith, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Michigan. “Although a massive undertaking in its own right, this draft tree of life represent only a first step”.

The Evolution Lab features two interactive digital learning tools-made available online for the first time here-developed by the Life on Earth project based at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The scientific world is no stranger to the creation of such trees, but nearly all previous attempts has been done on specific branches of the overall tree of life.

The aim was to create software tools and algorithms that balanced performance with efficiency when combining large numbers of trees, Hinchliff said.

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 goal of reconstructing the tree of life is one of the most daunting challenges in biology”, the research team wrote in its paper. The project took more than 36 months to get completed.

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.

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.

She also asked her peers to revise existing information and said that if it all goes well, the mechanism will be not unlike that that people use to contribute to Wikipedia.

One popular study estimated a staggering 8.7 millions of species on Earth today, let alone in the planet’s entire history. “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 first version is a crucial starting point that others can refine and improve over the next several decades.

The research was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, amount to .76 million and spanning three years.